The goal

Waiting Time for Surgery aims to predict future surgery times and analyse bottlenecks based on available past medical data and various other data sources. The web-based software provides useful information for both patients and medical staff and gives insight into when and why surgery queues get longer. This information will help make decisions and resource plans to make way for more efficient healthcare.

The result

We implemented forecasting time series data model and a web application for the patients and medical staff of the hospital.

Our application provides:

• Predictive model, based on Facebook’s Prophet procedure, for surgery waiting times with automated daily recalculations
• Backend API to provide historical data of surgery waiting times calculated from available operational data
• Info TV view to be used on health care and hospital premises. Providing current surgery queues for common surgery types
• Dashboard for the medical staff to visualize historical and predicted surgery waiting times

The future

With the help of deeper medical domain knowledge, this project could be expanded to explaining the causes for changes in surgery queues. This application was made to be used with data provided by Turku University Hospital, but it should be suitable for other hospitals also.