Annual planning with Gooroo Planner

Annual planning with Gooroo Planner

14/01/2020
by Rob Findlay

Gooroo Planner is great for the annual planning/contracting round – in fact, a couple of NHS trusts use it for little else.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it plans the whole hospital (or health economy) in a single model, so with a couple of clicks you can add everything up and reveal the big picture, as well as diving deep into the detail. From emergency medicine to orthopaedic inpatients to outpatient ophthalmology, it’s all there in one place.

Manage complex scenarios

Secondly, it makes it easy to manage all the complex scenarios that are a fact of life when negotiations are underway, because you can throw in scenarios by the table-load. This is powerful because each table can contain lots of demand assumptions, waiting time targets, and performance assumptions covering hundreds of clinical services.

Want to run the “stretch target” scenario across the entire hospital? Just update with the “stretch target” table. And that’s on top of the built-in scenarios that make it easy to switch from one planning objective to another.

Decluttered negotiations

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the negotiations more transparent. When trusts use Gooroo Planner to share their models with commissioners, all of the underlying statistical data, assumptions, methods, and rationales are open and consistently presented.

We have seen interesting things happen when trusts shared models with commissioners. In the first year the commissioners challenged everything, as they would in the usual spreadsheet-based process. In the second year, they asked for clarification on a few more advanced points. And in the third year, they pretty much accepted the data and the modelling, which meant that everyone could skip the painful picking over the numbers and move directly to the substance of how next year was going to work.

Many of you will have experience of picking over numbers in spreadsheets for literally months on end, and will appreciate how much time and effort this could save.

Expert support

Finally, you have support. Everybody using Gooroo Planner has unlimited remote support directly from us (and we normally respond same-day), so help is at hand when the other side asks complicated questions. We are well accustomed to supporting both sides of the same negotiation without revealing either side’s position, and in our experience it is rare for such awkwardness to arise anyway.

So if you aren’t already using Gooroo Planner for your annual planning and contract negotiations, there is still time to get you up and running in January even if you’ve never used Gooroo Planner before. Get in touch, and we’ll be happy to help you out.

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