NHS

Dynamic Real-Time Patient Centred Scheduling (PCS) Solution

Coperforma, one of the leading consultants and managers of patient transportation services for NHS, has worked in partnership with Magenta Technology to build a solution for real-time automatic scheduling and rescheduling of the available fleet of vehicles to patient bookings. The key objectives set for the development team were to help NHS and patient transportation services providers to:

• optimise the fleet to minimise empty mileage and maximise utilisation of the fleet capacity,
• deliver on-time transportation service for patients within the service levels agreed with NHS,
• reduce manual involvement in scheduling process.

Coperforma was comissioned by NHS to drive the reform of the patient transportation services provided to NHS by a variety of suppliers - both NHS owned and private. For many years the levels of service provided to NHS in patient transportation left much to be desired due to a large number of dynamics factors involved in the process including:

• patients being late to be picked up to go to and from appointments,
• traffic accidents or broken vehicles,
• variations in the types of required and available vehicles and equipment on board,
• individual requirements of patients and healthcare providers with regard to the levels of service.

As a result vehicles could often be late for pickup or would not arrive at all, patients could be on board longer than allowed for their condition, and the cost of providing the service was far too high due to critical inefficiencies in using the available fleet of vehicles and impossibility to provide effective schedule and consolidate journeys.

Magenta Technology's Patient Centred Scheduling (PCS) solution is a dynamic real time scheduling software based on Magenta's MaxOptra dynamic scheduling engine and delivered to Coperforma and NHS as an online service. Applied for patient transportation, MaxOptra PCS allows taking bookings online and dynamically allocating them to the available fleet of vehicles in real time, enabling healthcare service providers and Coperforma to dramatically improve the patient experience and optimise their limited and highly specialised fleet of vehicles to reduce the mileage and increase the fleet utilisation.

MaxOptra PCS provides:

• Advance booking facility for healthcare providers to enable streamlined and quick booking process including reverse and regular bookings,
• Automatic real time dynamic scheduling of bookings to ensure more effective and cost efficient transportation operations through:
  • Advisement by the system of optimum booking preferences at the time of booking,
  • Real time tracking of vehicles' position,
  • Optimisation of the fleet based on a variety of criteria to:
    • Minimise empty mileage and maximise utilization of the fleet capacity,
    • Reduce operational costs,
    • Ensure agreed Customer Service Levels;
• Secure yet easy way to access and manage the data online for:
  • Vehicle suppliers - to access vehicle details and managing their profiles and availability,
  • Healthcare providers - to manage wards' and clinics' profiles, required service levels, working hours and preferences, and view reports.

The Patient Centred Scheduling solution developed by Magenta Technology ensured increased sofistication of scheduling and optimisation around:

• priority of patients and their specific requirements,
• required and available vehicles and equipment,
• profiles and specific service level requirements of individual healthcare providers.

This allowed Coperforma to:

• provide up to 16% Overall Efficiency Improvement,
• substantially improve service levels,
• considerably reduce the scheduling and operational team managing the process.

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