The Right Location for Healthcare Facilities

[bfulghum]

Name: Bob Fulghum

Title: President

Company: Altab Solutions

 

Overview of Use Case

If you were going to choose an area to locate a healthcare center, where would you put it? Using Alteryx Designer and Curis Healthcare Demand Data we created a Gallery App to help our client select locations for new healthcare facilities and understand which physician specialties will most likely be in demand at each location. Using Alteryx Designer spatial tools, we were able to estimate the number of physician office visits to originate from each location’s trade area.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Our challenge was to find where to locate new physician clinics and to define what types of physicians should be staffed at each location. We wanted to provide a data driven approach to finding locations best suited to new healthcare centers. We needed to use data to guide the development of profitable facilities that will also enable the network to provide superior care to the local community.

Describe your working solution

For this project we used Alteryx Server, Gallery, Spatial tools, Map Input and Guzzler Drivetime Methodology. We created self-service apps on Alteryx Gallery that allow users across different departments and markets to create reports on demand. All of the reports can be exported in the standard Gallery outputs (PDF, excel, HTML, word) to best serve the particular needs of each user.

The client was originally interested in analyzing two physician specialties (Allergy specialists and Orthopedic specialists) in one metropolitan area but soon wanted to analyze all of the physician specialties (17 different physician specialties are tracked) in several metropolitan areas.

Through a simple Gallery interface the user can enter an address or place a push pin on a map to define a study location. The user will then enter a trade area in minutes that will be the area of interest. In smaller markets with less competition the user can define a trade area that may be larger than in dense urban/suburban areas where the existing network of providers is closer together.

The App then generates a report identifying the number of physician office visits by physician specialty to originate from the trade area analyzed. 

The report also includes existing healthcare facilities in the map view to give the user an indication of the existing supply network.

We also benchmark the expected physician office visits per person against the state and county to help identify hot spots that have relatively more demand compared to the state or county:

To identify precisely where the demand for each specialty is coming from within the trade area there are thematic maps to illustrate where the visits are originating. Pediatrics and Cardiovascular examples:

 

A snapshot of the existing network of physicians helps the client identify specialties that are currently serving the trade area.

 This is one tool the client uses to help guide them in the real estate choices they make to uncover profitable clinic locations that serve the needs of the community in the best way possible.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Rather than having analysts sifting through the convoluted government CMS data and attempting to compile and make sense of it, the analysts are now actually analyzing the key data contained in the Alteryx reports and driving business decisions.

The client is able to quickly get a snapshot of the physician supply and demand in the trade area/market that that they could not get before.  Compiling this type of data from the disparate sources (CMS, CDC NAMCS) and then modeling it out to make estimates was prohibitively time consuming and expensive. 

By leveraging Alteryx and Curis Healthcare Demand Data we are able to provide a powerful report with actionable insight directly to the analysts needing the information very quickly and cost effectively. The report brings the mountains of data to life in a way that allows them to make impactful decisions.

Related Resources

Curis Healthcare Data: www.curiscorp.com

[adrianloong]

Love this case study!

[sz640413]

It is a great case study!

Do you have a workflow with sample dataset to download?