Hospital Network Planning Using Location Analytics

Let’s bring back our plain, bubbles, and icons visualization we showed you at the beginning of this series and see how much value is waiting to be unlocked, shall we?

Here’s what you need to know about this map:

• Red cross icons = Hospitals in network
• Blue bubbles = English-speaking patients
• Yellow bubbles = Spanish-speaking patients
• Size of  bubble = Patient visit frequency

And here’s what this customer of ours was trying to do:
Their goal was to evaluate their hospital network and develop a plan for their network strategy based on:

1. Under/over-utilization of current locations
2. Best areas for future locations

#1) Under/Over Utilization of Current Locations

We will start our analysis by taking a look at who is going to which hospital. To do that, we’ll use a spider plot (also known as a flow chart) to see which patients visited each hospital.

Now, just in this first view, we start to see some interesting things. This visualization shows a lot of people going past two other hospitals in the network to visit Clinicas Mi Doctor. The data compels us to take action and uncover the reason why.

• Do we need to do better marketing? 
• Do we need to do better physician training? 
• Could it be that we need additional Spanish-speaking clinics (or need to better market our current Spanish-speaking clinics) since many of the patients passing by the other hospitals are Spanish-speaking? 

Another thing we can see just by looking at the map is that there are a variety of patients who came to the hospital site for multiple visits.

By using custom popups, we can click on each patient bubble and see data that is within our Qlik dataset. There were two things that the customer discovered from this analysis:

INSIGHT #1 >>  A handful of patients went to one location and had to leave and go to a different location to get the service they needed.

ACTION >>  Answering questions such as: How can we make it easier for our patients so they only have to travel to one site? Do we need to offer more services at more locations?
INSIGHT #2 >>  There are patients going to various sites in a short time period.

ACTION >>   Answering questions such as: Could this be a drug user? Could this be someone committing fraud? This was not the goal of the dashboard, but our customer was able to unintentionally identify some of these fraudulent issues and misuse of the system and put a stop to it.

#2) Best Locations for Future Hospitals: Where To Build And What Partners To Add?

Let’s say you have a company objective and goal to have all your patients within two miles of your hospital (or your store, your restaurant, etc.). We can simply turn on radial plots to see which patients are outside the target radius.

It’s now easy to visually see that we need another hospital in the northern region to serve a handful of patients. We can also compare the visualization above with a heat map to find the location that has the highest density of patients.

Ideally, we’ll want to place a hospital in the middle of the northern hotspot. But we can also look to see if a clinic outside our network already exists. To do this, we simply do a Google search within QlikMaps to see if there are any clinics in the area. Once we pull in this layer of data from Google, we can interact with that on the map like it were our own data to see if it helps achieve our goals.

Finally, we can also pull in data from outside our data source to evaluate the demographics of territories as a separate layer on the map. In the example below, we pulled in open data from the US Census to see the median age of the area.

You are now equipped with data-driven reasons to pitch a new location to your boss because you can show with data:

1. The overutilization and underutilization of current locations.
2. The ability to achieve the corporate goal of having a networked location within 2 miles of all patients.
3. The demographics of the desired new location.

Features Used: radial plots, spider plots, heat maps, search functionality, ESRI integration
Shown in QlikMaps for QlikView

Spot A Problem – Take Instant Action
(Instead of jumping from app to app, you can centralize your workflow to your map. Yes… We just rhymed there.) 

Crime Analysis
(You may not be tracking criminals, but all businesses can use the functions they’re using to visualize data changes)

You can watch the full webinar to see all the features in action and get tips from QlikMaps product architect, Patrick Vinton, OR you can check out these blog posts that will spark your creativity for how to use location analytics to get business value.