An airport solution …

Founded in Denmark, Netcompany developed its data orchestration platform, PULSE, to improve passenger flow at Copenhagen Airport.

‘They came to us as a dominant force in the IT market in Denmark and said, "can you help us with this problem?" ' Whysall explained.

‘What we did was look at all of their data flows across the airport and found there were lots of micro optimisations, so if you save a minute here, a minute here, but multiply that by 1,000 passengers, actually that's a lot of time that you're saving, so we developed a platform, which is called AIRHART.'

… taken to the NHS

Having successfully increased annual passenger capacity at the airport from 30m to 40m, Netcompany looked at developing its PULSE platform to solve flow problems in others markets, including healthcare.

‘PULSE is a data orchestration platform that helps organisations increase flow, allowing a chief operating officer or their team to make real-time decisions on data that's being purchased from every single system that they interact with,' Whysall explained.

‘When we see flow being looked at in NHS organisations, it's very similar to what Copenhagen was doing.

‘In the NHS leaders may be looking at buying theatre allocation software or something that helps optimise ED.

‘What they're not doing is then looking at what the impact that ED has on the rest of the system, because if you remove a blocker somewhere all you tend to do is move it to the next stage in the system.

‘What you've got to do, and what we did at Copenhagen, was look across the system.'

Testing concepts

Netcompany is working with a handful of trusts in the UK to test its concepts.

‘We are beginning with small concepts such as how you can reprofile theatre workflow following cancelations to dynamically respond to that to maximise your throughput,' Whysall explained.

The platform uses data modelling to intelligently overbook and create more capacity downstream.

‘It's about maximising supply and demand and doing that in real time and in the moment,' Whysall said.

‘North Star'

The chief executive said increasing patient flow through the back door of hospitals was his ‘North Star'.

‘That is the area that we've got the ability to have the greatest impact,' he said, while acknowledging this was still a work in progress because of the ‘complexity involved'.

‘There's 46 organisations that impact the flow at Copenhagen airport and I don't think that's dissimilar to the amount of organisations probably within an ICS that would have an impact on discharge,' he noted.

‘If we could start to absorb the data around supply and demand from those organisations into our data orchestration platform, we could begin to intelligently make decisions around the person who is medically optimised for discharge when all they're waiting for is a bed in social care.

‘They can see there's a bed available and do that digitally rather than the discharge manager or the bed clerk starting to phone around and exchange spreadsheets.'

Whysall said PULSE can integrate data from different organisations at varying levels of digital maturity, for example, by creating a form to populate for a nursing home without a digital system.

A new journey

The chief executive said he had been encouraged by his early conversations with NHS trusts about PULSE.

‘We're working with bold chief executives and chief operating officers who are saying, we recognise the need for change, and we're, we're happy to come on that journey,' he noted.

Watch this space.