What happens to your product when your requirements are lacking

Well, then of course the developer does whatever they want

Hospital at a Glance - making it kind of different

Everybody seems pretty keen to get their own hospital at a glance system - if you can quickly see the state of the hospital then you can see any problems and you can juggle your resources (um, you know, nurses) as needed.  We know of a few hospitals that have recently implemented a hospital at a glance system, so we visited them and stole all their ideas.

Typically the main page of the system is a bar graph where each bar is a ward in the hospital, each level within the bar is a bed.  You can then colour code the bed based on the speciality and maybe add overlays and things for other information (e.g. is the patient past their expected discharge date). So we ended up with something like this (based on development data - so not good data):

Isn't it pretty? Aren't we clever? Everyone was pretty happy with this, until my collegue said that most of the page was taken up with occupancy stats (they are not that important) and all the important information (like hours and resourcing variance (e.g. are the peeps working to hard and do we have the right kind and enough of the peeps)) was crammed down the bottom and not that visible/accessible.  It also kind of skews things because some wards are bigger than others; just because they have more patients in the ward doesn't really mean anything as they also have more available beds and resourcing.

Pssssh, whatever. What a jerk. Well, hmmm, maybe he's right.

So then I got to have some fun with CSS.

We threw the graph away and we ended up with tiles.  Interestingly, pretty much everyone who looked at it initially hated it, but after a while using it changed their minds and decided it was the bee's knees.  There are a few variations of tiles depending on the type of ward (e.g. emergency departments have their own tile).

Each tile represents a ward; this is the tile for ward W2B:

The coloured bars along the top and the bottom (the two purple horizontal strips) indicate the over-all health of ward based on simple questionnaires that can be filled in by clinical staff - so this is basically the opnion of the people on the ward as to how their ward is doing. Each question they answer has a weighting and can move the ward through these colours:

The above screenshot is purple, so they have extra capacity. This indicates resources could be taken from the ward and moved to another ward that is struggling.
Questionnaires are entered using the + and past quesionnaires can be viewed using the ?.

The hours variance comes from TrendCare.  A positive amount is good meaning the nurses are under allocated and have some spare time, a red negative amount means the nurses are overallocated and need assistance.

When you hover over the specialties it will give you a breakdown of the bed count for that specialty:

And there is a key for the specialties at the bottom of the page