Home
Patient Flow
FlowModels Percept World Class Commissioning
Breast
Screening Simulation Tools
Mental Health
18 Weeks 'Lean Thinking'
Bed Management
Client Comments
More About Us
Contact Us
The NHS faces many challenges and, from a patient’s point-of-view, these are most likely seen as delays, queues, and cancellations.
Real-time Bed Management, Balanced Patient Flows, and Optimized Resource Allocations are high impact changes that mean Acute and Community Hospitals can deliver greater care to the people you care most about.
In particular, we want to work with leading Acute, Primary, & Mental Health professionals who want to:
Focused_On is a company formed solely to help the NHS with these issues.
The inspiration for the services of Focused_On arose when Brent Wherry was admitted for Neurosurgery. Twice, Brent was admitted, prepared for theatre but discharged through a lack of ICU Nurses. The operation was scheduled as 8 hour duration, so this lack of planning caused the loss to the Trust of a whole day's Theatre time, as well as wasting the day for a Neurosurgeon, an ENT surgeon, an Anaesthetist and an Operating Team. Post-op, he acquired MRSA.
Thankfully, Brent's operation and recovery were a great success. Brent will continually remember he owes his life to the skill and dedication of the Surgeons and Nurses. And while in an isolation ward, he had the time to reflect how he might apply his skills and experience towards helping the NHS solve some of its problems.
Co-Founders Brent Wherry and Steven Burnell first met in 1989 when they worked for an international software company. Once again Brent & Steven joined forces, this time to present innovative ideas to the Government Dti for better Patient Flow planning within the NHS. After searching worldwide, but not finding anything like the solutions we were proposing, the UK Government awarded a Grant to our Company to prove the technical feasibility of our ideas. We did this successfully and much of the funding was spent retaining the services of senior Nurses and Clinicians.
 |
Following his initial degree in Mathematics from Imperial College, Brent had a long and very successful career in the software industry and has proven skills in producing effective solutions for fairly difficult problems. | 
| Steven's early career was in some of the UK's best managed factories, and he has led successful finance operations and sales teams in the software industry. |
Over 50 years of experience is Focused_On health
Rather than a mission statement, Focused_On Health has a Credamus ( Derived from the latin "We Believe" , vs. Credo, or "I believe" ).
We use the plural with great purpose. Any successful team of people must share compatible and complementary personal values.
This "Credamus" states our values, which are:We regard solving problems as more important than computer bits and bytes. However in order to make the best product, we must use the most appropriate tools. Our choice has therefore been :
Because of the dominance of Windows and Microsoft Office in the NHS, it would be foolish not to use this platform. Use of standard Microsoft technology also means that a massive reservoir of resources is available from third parties and that we are left with no issues concerned with things like incompatible communication protocols or lack of language support for such things as database features we might need.
For this reason, our development platform is Visual Studio, using C#. We are then able to leverage the benefits of interoperability and language independence which come from using Microsoft "managed code".
Focused_On are happy to work with either Discrete Event Simulation or with System Dynamics. Our paper Populations or Patients lays out the considerations for using each technology.
For Discrete Event Simulation we have a choice from a number of simulation products on the market. Most of these products have their roots in the Manufacturing Industries. We did a very detailed appraisal of the available products and decided to use Extend from ImagineThatInc. Our reasons for this choice were based on the extensive range of general purpose "blocks" available, the sophisticated structure of the internal TimeSet (enabling models of many thousand blocks to be efficiently handled) and the ease with which the general purpose blocks could be moulded to meet specific Health provision needs. A number of years of experience confirms that this was a good decision as the product is advancing and the support can only be described as excellent.For System Dynamic simulations the chosen engine is iThink from iSee Systems
Strategic Locational Decisions are well addressed by using SITATION, the Discete Location software available from Mark Daskin. Focused_On have written some very effective software to interface this with the European Maps of Microsoft MapPoint.
For more detailed analysis, Focused_On have their own LocationFocus software which enables finer planning and also allows residual demands to be grouped using a simple Factorial Clustering algorithm.
OPTIMISED RESOURCES : GREATER PATIENT CARE