🙋♂️ What is Care Traffic Control?

In this post we are going to offer a definition that is a more literal alignment with air traffic control than you may have seen. But first we want to give some background that might show why I chose this definition.

🪙 Who coined it?

  • Dr. John Halamka, now with Mayo, in an interview with Fox Business in 2015.
  • Vision was a command center with access to your "connected self" devices like smart watches, Fitbits, smart scales, BP devices and wearable EKG's.
  • Caregivers are monitoring you remotely to keep you out of the hospital.

🏄♀️ Go with the flow

  • Since then Care Traffic Control has centered on patient flow.
  • New Hampshire DHHS is using it to prevent boarding of psych patients in the ED.
  • HNS is using Care Traffic Control to speed up discharges.
  • Teletracking is a CTC product focusing on patient flow.
  • Maybe we should broaden the scope of Care Traffic Control.

🚶♂️ What is traffic

  • With 10 years in Air Traffic Control, I think Care Traffic Control has an even more direct alignment.
  • That alignment comes from the emergence of Location Based Services (LBS).
  • LBS is like the radar in ATC.
  • Motion is endemic to healthcare operations.
  • Motion is a well-known source of waste.

📜 Real Time Healthcare

  • In 2018, Gartner said "The real-time health system (RTHS) is a conceptual, operational and technology paradigm for the next-generation healthcare delivery organization (HDO). The RTHS transforms the HDO into an enterprise that is aware, collaborative, and smart. The RTHS assimilates real-time operational intelligence to achieve business objectives."
  • Sounds a lot like what we want from Care Traffic Control.

✒️ Let's define Care Traffic Control

  • Here we go: "Care Traffic Control is using situational awareness and automation to optimize mobile workflows across the enterprise."
  • Let do some unpacking here.

⚗️ Breaking it down

  • Situation awareness is used by people to make decisions in a short planning horizon.
  • Awareness is found in context like LBS and other HIS systems.
  • We want to emphasize automation as a fundamental property of CTC.
  • CTC has human-in-the-loop automation that comes from digital twin.
  • RTHC focuses on all operations, but CTC optimizes mobile operations.
  • CTC is across the enterprise with connected workflows to remove bottlenecks.

🛣️ Journey not a puzzle

  • This definition shows why the digital twin is so important.
  • Each week in the newsletter we have been laying out the pieces.
  • But this is a journey not a puzzle.
  • There are valuable steps that can be taken right away
  • I have received so much encouragement from many who are excited to get started.
  • It starts with a model so let's build one together!

There is more on this topic in the newsletter. Please sign up.