With location planning for healthcare providers you can ensure your budget stretches as far as feasibly possible. From the allocation of services to composition of your distribution network, location planning will help you make efficiency savings while ensuring the best possible care standards for local residents. In this article, we will take a closer look at the many ways public and private healthcare bosses can utilise location planning.
Location planning for healthcare providers helps you do more with less
Here are some of the most effective ways you can leverage location planning for healthcare providers:
1. Local Demographics
Gaining a better understanding of local demographics enables you to apportion your healthcare resources and facilities more accurately. This means understanding the key factors associated with certain types of healthcare requirement or risk. Over time, you will also need to understand how these demographics evolve so that services can be effectively adapted.
Age, socio-economic factors, employment, race and a myriad of other factors impact on the risk of developing certain conditions. This will determine which healthcare services would be most valuable for a particular area.
For example, services relevant to certain age demographics could include:
- Children: paediatric care or accident & emergency
- Adolescents/young adults: family planning/sexual health facilities, counselling or addiction services
- Older people: home visits, physiotherapy or older person rapid access clinics (OPRAC)
With location intelligence software you can find out about all these factors and then you can accurately chart the number of people possessing these traits within a defined area.
You can even combine this pre-existing information with anonymised health records to find out how many people with specific requirements live in certain areas and plot all this information on an intuitive digital map to effectively allocate your services and resources.
2. Regional coverage
Gaining a macro perspective of your regional coverage enables you to optimise resource deployment while ensuring all residents have convenient access to services.
With location intelligence software you can plot all your healthcare facilities/resources on a single map including:
- Hospitals
- GP surgeries
- Walk-in centres
- Ambulance hubs
- Social care facilities
- Specialist facilities
- Facilities with specialist equipment
Using our White Space tool which is unique to Periscope® you can also identify any areas not yet suitably covered with regards to a specific healthcare service. You will also be able to:
- Calculate drive times and public transport routes to assess whether facilities can be conveniently accessed as well as estimating required parking capacity.
- Consider proximity to your logistics network. Whether delivering everyday items such as medication, food or cleaning products, or dispatching ad hoc deliveries of blood, organs or specialist equipment, logistical costs can quickly rack up.
- Position your healthcare facilities to provide convenient access to major transport interchanges to help you cut your logistics budget significantly.
Location planning for healthcare providers offers so much potential. Augment your healthcare services by adopting advanced location intelligence software to ensure your healthcare budget goes further by optimising your locations with Periscope®.