The Challenge
The hospital managed bed occupancy, theatres and emergency through physical whiteboards and phone calls between departments. Without real-time visibility, patient flow bottlenecked and staff were allocated inefficiently.
The Solution
Avantit built a Power BI solution fed by the hospital information system and IoT sensors. Dashboards on screens at nursing stations show occupancy by ward, emergency waiting times and theatre availability, with automatic alerts when occupancy passes 85%.
📋 Overview
A regional central hospital with 450 beds, serving a population of 300,000. It runs a 24/7 emergency department, 8 operating theatres and multiple medical specialities.
🎯 The Challenge
Business context Operational management faced critical problems:
- Physical whiteboards on the wards recorded bed occupancy, updated by hand
- Discharge coordination happened over the phone between doctors, nurses and social services
- No way to anticipate emergency peaks or plan scheduled discharges
- Nurses allocated statically, regardless of actual workload
- Excessive waiting time between the decision to admit and a bed being assigned
Technical requirements
- Real time: data refreshed every 5 minutes, not daily reports.
- Multi-device: usable on corridor screens, desktops and charge nurses’ tablets.
- HIS integration: connect to the existing hospital information system, replacing nothing.
- Privacy: full compliance with GDPR and health regulation.
- Alerts: proactive notification when a metric crosses a defined threshold.
💡 The Solution
Strategic approach An analytics layer over the existing hospital system, replacing no clinical system at all. Power BI Premium provides near-real-time refreshes and Azure IoT Hub carries the bed presence sensor data.
Technical implementation
- Data pipeline: Azure Data Factory extracts from the HIS every 5 minutes into a dedicated Azure SQL database, cleaning and normalising admission, discharge and transfer records.
- IoT bed sensors: pressure sensors in each bed report through Azure IoT Hub, confirming physical occupancy independently of the administrative record.
- Power BI dashboards: four of them — Bed Occupancy (by ward, by speciality), Emergency (waiting times, triage), Operating Theatre (schedule, utilisation rate) and Staffing (nurse-to-patient ratio per shift).
- Proactive alerts: Power Automate notifies managers when occupancy passes 85%, when emergency waiting times exceed their limits, or when theatre utilisation falls below 60%.
Timeline
- Phase 1 (discovery and data mapping): 4 weeks
- Phase 2 (data pipeline and IoT): 6 weeks
- Phase 3 (dashboards and alerts): 4 weeks
- Phase 4 (single-ward pilot and rollout): 4 weeks
📈 The Results
Success metrics
- 🏥 Waiting time: 40% less time between the decision to admit and a bed being assigned.
- 📊 Visibility: occupancy of all 450 beds visible in real time on any device.
- 👩⚕️ Staffing: nurses allocated dynamically on real workload rather than fixed rotas.
- 🔔 Proactivity: alerts surface occupancy problems 4 to 6 hours before they become critical.
Business impact Real-time visibility changed how the hospital is run. Resource decisions moved from reactive to proactive, improving both the patient experience and the working conditions of clinical staff.
🛠️ Technology Stack
- Power BI Premium: near-real-time dashboards refreshing every 5 minutes.
- Azure Data Factory: ETL from the hospital system.
- Azure IoT Hub: ingestion of bed sensor data.
- Azure SQL Database: dedicated hospital data warehouse.
- Power Automate: proactive alerts and notifications.
💬 Client Testimonial
“We used to look at the whiteboard and make phone calls to find out whether there were beds. Now any charge nurse opens a tablet and sees the whole hospital. It sounds obvious — but it completely transformed how we manage patient flow.”
Operations Director Regional Central Hospital
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