The Challenge

Lovisenberg Diaconal Hospital finds itself in a situation familiar to many hospitals: growing waiting lists and increasing pressure on healthcare personnel.

Planning operating room capacity is a complex puzzle with an enormous number of pieces. When meeting with the surgical schedulers at Lovisenberg, it quickly became clear that the work was highly manual—often done with pen and paper, relying heavily on tacit knowledge.

Information about waiting lists, room time, patient characteristics, and available resources was fragmented across departments and systems, making planning both time-consuming and vulnerable. Without a shared and up-to-date overview of what was required to ensure high activity in the operating rooms, it was difficult to secure good utilization, predictable operations, and robust plans.

It became evident that Lovisenberg needed a holistic and data-driven tool that could combine deep insight with actionable suggestions at both the tactical and operational levels. This became the foundation for the collaboration to develop the SaaS solution Deepinsight Hero.

Developed Together With Healthcare Professionals

Through a close and iterative collaboration, Lovisenberg and Deepinsight developed Deepinsight Hero. The schedulers participated actively in insight work, testing, and improvements, ensuring that the solution was shaped around their actual workday.

“What is unique about Deepinsight is that they put themselves in the clinicians’ shoes and developed a tool tailored to the users. Instead of forcing clinicians to adapt to the system, Deepinsight Hero has been built around the real work situation of healthcare personnel,” says Assistant Clinic Manager, Henrik Hofgaard.

Deepinsight Hero uses advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to help leaders, planners, staffing coordinators, and clinicians in the surgical department create and execute effective operating schedules. By providing deep insight into actual patient inflow, Deepinsight Hero enables planning based on real needs. The result is data-driven surgical programs that improve operations and ensure that Lovisenberg can treat more patients with the same resources.

Read more about Deepinsight Hero here

Easier Planning – and Hours Saved

Today, around 35 employees with various roles in orthopedics, ENT, and general surgery use Deepinsight Hero every day.

“Better suggestions, fewer changes, and user-friendly functionality mean that many roles save several workdays each month. This gives us robust and standardized planning, creating the foundation for stable and efficient operations,” says the staffing coordinator at Lovisenberg.

Deepinsight Hero is fully integrated with DIPS Arena (EHR), ensuring that information is consistent across systems with no need for double registration. When a patient is booked in Deepinsight Hero, it is automatically written back into DIPS. Up to 50 patients are booked for surgery through the solution each day.

“Now I’ve scheduled many patients through Deepinsight Hero. It’s fun to book—and so easy,” says one of the surgical planners.

How Lovisenberg Increases Surgical Activity With AI

Deepinsight Hero is built on several core components that integrate AI and optimization, developed specifically for the hospital’s planning needs. The optimization models account for bottlenecks and search through an enormous number of combinations. This makes it possible to generate robust and transparent plans that cannot be created manually.

Examples of AI in Deepinsight Hero:

Structured data: Language model for structuring free-text data.

Waiting list: Machine learning model for predicting waiting list development.

Activity plan: Optimization model that automatically generates activity plans for surgeons.

Tactical plan: Optimization model that automatically generates tactical plans for daily operating schedules.

Patient suggestions: Planners receive automated suggestions for available operating time based on patient status and priorities.

Record Increase in Number of Surgeries

The introduction of Deepinsight Hero at Lovisenberg has delivered several measurable improvements. Most importantly, the collaboration has contributed to a record increase (13%) in the number of completed surgeries. This means Lovisenberg now treats more patients with the same resources.

“It’s incredible how much we’ve managed to incorporate into a system that appears simple, yet solves so many challenges,” says Hanne Rusten Solås, Department Manager at Lovisenberg.

Accurate predictions and optimized suggestions have reduced the administrative burden on planners and enabled better utilization of the hospital’s resources. Deepinsight Hero is built on the hospital’s own data and fine-tuned in close collaboration with the schedulers. Deepinsight has proven that AI and optimization can deliver a significant increase in activity, ultimately leading to better patient care.

Other results after implementing Deepinsight Hero:

• The waiting list for orthopedics (inpatient) and ENT day surgery has been reduced by approximately 20%

• Time spent on planning is significantly reduced

• Over 35 daily users of the solution across most specialties in the surgical department

• Quantitative understanding of internal operations

• Strengthened collaboration and a shared understanding of priorities and resources
  
  

Read more about Deepinsight Hero