Gooroo Planner upgrade: faster, easier uploads

Gooroo Planner upgrade: faster, easier uploads

20/05/2020
by Rob Findlay

We have today released an upgrade to Gooroo Planner, and the new version is available now at no extra cost. The main improvement is that Planner Professional users will benefit from faster, easier, and more reliable data uploads.

Let’s start with ‘easier’.

When you use the Gooroo Planner website to upload data for a new planning model, it is usually simplest to prepare mostly patient-level data files, and let Gooroo Planner do the complicated maths that turns them into statistics. But that has meant uploading rather a lot of files: one for activity, one for additions to the waiting list, and one for waiting list snapshots; and then the same again because your outpatient data comes from a different source from your admitted patient data. Then you probably have a theatre activity file and some statistical assumptions as well, so a typical data upload might involve around ten files.

Those ten data files had to be uploaded one after the other, some of the larger ones took a few minutes to process, and it was a bit fiddly keeping track of where you were up to. All in all, it wasn’t the most exciting task in the world, and it was easy to make a mistake.

Alright, the end result was something very powerful – a comprehensive planning model covering the entire trust – so it still compared very favourably with pasting the numbers into dozens or hundreds of spreadsheets by hand. But nobody likes a drudge.

All your uploads in one file

This upgrade does away with all that. Instead of uploading ten files one after the other, now you can zip them up and do it all in a single step. Gooroo Planner even creates your reports for you (i.e. the answers coming out of the model), so you don’t have to remember which settings you usually choose.

At this point you may be wondering: how does it know what order to process the files in? Or what settings to use when creating the reports? The answer is a thing called a ‘config file’. (If you already use the Planner API to automate your planning, you’ll be familiar with this because it’s exactly the same file.)

The config file contains all the instructions that you have been providing while you work through the wizards to upload data and create reports. It takes a little setting up the first time, but once that’s done it’s fairly straightforward to reuse. You can download and unzip a config file here and the fields are explained in the documentation under “Calculation and API settings”.

I also recommend you start using a date settings file to control the exact dates of the past and future periods; again you can download one here and the format is explained in the documentation under “Date settings table” (just after the section for the config file).

To upload everything in one file, you need to:
a) put all the files you want to upload (both patient-level and statistical) in the same folder;
b) put the config file into the same folder (it must be called Goorooconfig.xml);
c) put the date settings file into the same folder (it must be called DateSettings.csv);
d) select all the files in the folder and zip them (but don’t zip the folder itself, only the files inside it);
e) upload that zip file when you get to the first step of the upload wizard to create a new dataset, tick the box to confirm what you are doing, and the wizard will take it from there.

There is a video showing the process here, and as always please ask for support if you need it.

Faster and more reliable

The upgrade also improves performance significantly so you should notice that everything processes a lot faster. When I timed it, the upgraded software processed eight data files and created a report in less time than the old software took to process one of the large patient-level files.

The upgrade also improves reliability by introducing a queueing system. So if, by chance, two people happen to upload files at the same time, it will queue them to avoid clashes in the database.

Chart filtering

Finally, we have improved the Charts tab.

Before, if you had 500 clinical services in your Gooroo Planner model, you got 500 clinical services in the Charts tab whether you wanted them or not.

Now the Charts tab inherits the filters you apply in the Report tab, so you can narrow it down to the things you want to see.

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