The Smartest Woman in Facilities Planning Isn’t a Human: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), found a way to make facilities planning stress-free with an algorithm.

When you hear the term “planning” does it cause a sudden burst of anxiety? Regardless of industry, face-to-face planning sessions can be tense enough to make teams over-think or perhaps under-analyze crucial concepts based on incomplete data. Depending on a team’s resources, data could be outdated, factually incorrect, or not thorough enough to project growth or stagnation.

To cut down on this confusion in the realm of healthcare facilities, Doug Carney, SVP for Facilities, Real Estate and Capital Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), found a way to make facilities planning stress-free with an algorithm.

At HFIF ’15, Carney gave a talk about smart, integrated planning. To kickoff the brief session, he took an informal, verbal poll of his attendees asking whom had facilities master plans (most) and then of those, current master plans (about half).

Defining a Need

Carney used those insights to setup the basis for his argument: planning should be agile. For many facilities across the US, static planning can be difficult to update and require expensive consulting. In fact, CHOP worked with seven different consulting firms over the last 20 years to create 9 master plans to the tune of almost $2 million.

A solution to agile planning became clear—invest in technology. Using a proprietary planning program named C.A.S.S.andra—a tribute to the prophetic vision of Cassandra from Greek mythology—Carney demonstrated two versions of the program over the last few years.

Making the Case

Version 1.0 provided positive and negative growth analysis over a 21-year period. Based on the collected data, Carney defined three growth drivers of high acuity inpatient spaces.

More than 1% growth over the first 14 years

Transition from 35% to 65% ICU beds

Market forces or other regulatory reasons that required 100% private inpatient rooms

Armed with data visualizations, the synthesized information created a concrete case for building a new healthcare pavilion as at least one of the bullets was proven by CASS’s statistical model. The fact that such a powerful tool could help CHOP make smart growth investments quelled any fears from the hospital’s board of directors.

Source: Health Facilities Innovation Forum