SurgiQ is an Italian MedTech startup that developed QPlanner, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning feature that can be embedded into existing EHR solutions. QPlanner brings the power of AI by adding automatic planning to existing hospital information systems. The software is already introduced to the Dutch healthcare market and multiple care professionals had positive feedback on the possible improvements that AI can bring to the planning processes in their organizations.

What problem does the innovation solve?

With the rising demand for healthcare, ensuring quality, accessibility, efficiency, and affordability of care is more important than ever. An important process within these four pillars is healthcare planning. QPlanner is a cloud-based software that extracts data from the EMR system while linking it to the availability of staff and the organization’s capacity. The innovation can manage multiple resources, with different sets of parameters, across multiple domains. This includes infusion rooms, outpatient clinics, rehabilitative facilities, surgical procedures, and more. In the end, the solution facilitates long and complex care paths with many variables to be planned more efficiently to produce an optimal schedule.

How does the innovation work?

QPlanner adds value to the planning of multidisciplinary care paths. Within certain healthcare organizations, some patients require different professionals across different departments for care. Planning this requires horizontal communication between departments, often resulting in manual planning. In turn, manual planning of this kind of complex care often causes inefficiencies. QPlanner solves these inefficiencies by reducing horizontal communication. The reduction of planning errors leads to better quality, accessibility, efficiency, and affordability of care.

How does it impact healthcare providers?

As a healthcare provider, implementing QPlanner within your EMR has many benefits. In a physiotherapy user case, savings of more than 1 hour per day per coordinator were measured, and more than 20 minutes per day per therapist. In infusion rooms it was demonstrated that QPlanner can streamline the patient flow to avoid waits and overcrowding.

Business case

An Italian medical practice company (ICS Maugeri SpA Società Benefit) with a network of 18 hospitals decided to adopt SurgiQ’s technologies as part of the Digital Gym project. The SurgiQ platform supports physiotherapists in tasks such as planning and scheduling, both short and long term.

Results show that the technology can support coordinators to solve the planning task in a couple of minutes while taking into account many different constraints, satisfying at the same time management’s, patient’s and workforce’s requirements.

The client measured savings of about 20 minutes per day per therapist and more than 10 minutes of additional treatment delivered per day to each patient.

Do you want to read more about SurgiQ? Read an article we wrote about the company here.