The Challenge

Lovisenberg Diakonale Sykehus (LDS) found itself in a situation that many hospitals know all too well: growing waiting lists and increased pressure on healthcare personnel. 

Planning surgical capacity is a complex puzzle with an enormous number of pieces, and when meeting with the surgical planners at LDS, it was clear that the job was highly manual. Often with pen and paper and tacit knowledge as the primary tools. 

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

It became clear that LDS needed a holistic and data-driven tool that could connect deep insights with actual proposals at both tactical and operational levels. This formed the basis for the collaboration on the development of the cloud service Deepinsight Hero.

Developed for, and together with healthcare personnel

Through close and iterative collaboration, LDS and Deepinsight have developed Deepinsight Hero. Planners have actively participated in insight work, testing, and improvement, so that the solution is shaped around their actual workday.

– The unique thing about Deepinsight was that they familiarized themselves with the clinicians' needs and developed a tool adapted to the users. Instead of forcing clinicians to adapt to the system, Deepinsight Hero has been built around the healthcare personnel's actual work situation, says Assistant Clinical Director Henrik Hofgaard.

Deepinsight Hero uses advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to help managers, planners, staffing coordinators, and clinicians in the surgical departments design and execute high-quality surgical schedules. By providing deep insights into actual patient inflow, Deepinsight Hero makes it possible to plan based on real needs. The result is data-driven surgical schedules that yield better operations and ensure that LDS can treat more patients with the same resources. 

Read more about Deepinsight Hero

Easier planning – and several hours saved

Now, employees in various roles in orthopedics, ear-nose-throat (ENT), and general surgery use Deepinsight Hero every single day.

– Better suggestions, fewer changes, and user-friendly functionality mean that many roles save several working days a month. This gives us robust and standardized planning that builds a foundation for stable and efficient operations, says the staffing coordinator at LDS.

Deepinsight Hero is two-way integrated with the electronic health record system DIPS Arena, ensuring that information always matches across systems without the need for double registration. When a patient is booked in Deepinsight Hero, it is automatically written back to DIPS. Up to 50 patients are booked daily for surgery through the solution.

– Now I have scheduled many patients from Deepinsight Hero. Booking is fun – 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 based on the hospital's planning needs. The optimization models take bottlenecks into account and search through a massive number of combinations. This makes it possible to generate robust and transparent plans that cannot be prepared 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 trends.

Activity plan: Optimization model to automatically generate activity plans for surgeons. 

Tactical plan: Optimization model to automatically generate tactical plans for daily surgical schedules.

Patient suggestions: Surgical planners receive automated suggestions for available times for patients based on patient status and priorities.

Record increase in the number of surgeries

The introduction of Deepinsight Hero at LDS has yielded several documentable improvements. Above all, the collaboration has contributed to a record increase (22%)  in the number of completed surgeries. This means that LDS now treats more patients with the same resources. 

– It is incredible how much we have managed to put into a system that appears simple but solves so many challenges, says Hanne Rusten Solås, department head at LDS.

Precise 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 planners. Deepinsight has proven that AI and optimization can deliver a marked increase in activity, which ultimately has led to an improved patient service.

Other results after the introduction of Deepinsight Hero:

• Time spent on planning is significantly reduced

• 40+ daily users of the solution, across most specialties in the surgical department

• Quantitative understanding of their own operations

• Strengthened collaboration and a shared understanding of priorities and resources

Read more about Deepinsight Hero