The Conclude Consultancy

On the 18th December 2019, just 3 months after the business was formally incorporated, TCC-CASEMIX Limited was notified that it had been selected as one of 15 innovative SME’s across the UK to participate in the Global Business Innovation Programme being run by UK R&I. The award is to participate in an innovation mission to South Korea in October 2020.

TCC-CASEMIX (TM) is already being seen as a compelling proposition, as it is the only company of the 15 selected, that has so far received a specific request to engage directly with a hospital and research team in the south of the country.

Dr Bacon comments: “Our extensive literature review identified that the planning of operating theatre sessions is as challenging in South Korea as it is here in the UK – so we share exactly the same needs: increasingly ageing populations making ever increasing demands on surgery, means that we have to learn to do far more with less. For surgery this means controlling the drivers that cause cancelled operations as much as those that cause theatres and their teams to be standing idle.”

TCC-CASEMIX Limited will be taking with them on this mission their highly innovative surgical procedure survey technology. This enables real-time data capture of procedure durations, critical to effective procedure planning. Earlier this month, the business also won an Innovation Support Grant part funded by the European Development Fund (and supported by Medilink East Midlands) to develop the technologies required. This has enabled the business to work with two of the UK’s most innovative technology companies to develop the solution. At the same time Dr Bacon and his team have been designing some of the hardware for the technology using latest 3D modelling and printing technologies.

TCC-CASEMIX Trademark is filed as: UK00003464512

On September 18th 2019, TCC-CASEMIX Limited was incorporated at Companies House. Dr Bacon designed and conceived the new Med Tech business to be an exemplar of transformational change in acute NHS hospitals, by driving substantial improvements in productivity, and revenue generation in surgical services delivery.

From deficit to sustainable productivity

The transformational change is designed to raise productivity by 20% and improve surgical revenues for a typical NHS trust by circa £7.5m per year, at a time when the majority of acute NHS trusts are running deficits.

 February 2019: The NHS Improvement report [Opportunities to Reduce Waiting Lists] identified that nearly 300,000 patients each year had their urgent operations cancelled, directly because of poor planning. Currently, 54% of all surgical procedures over-run, resulting in cancelled operations. 43% of them under-run, leaving operating theatres standing idle. This also leads to a loss of revenues for all 156 acute trust of £1.25b annually. (ref: NHS Reference Cost datasets).

The government sponsored Getting it Right First Time reports provide the detailed evidence for poor planning. The General Surgery Report explains the situation in these terms: “surgeons have never typically collected surgical procedure duration data. ”

Without such data how can there ever be predictability of surgical services delivery?  Well there can’t be is the simple answer. However it is more complex than that. This is because evidence collected by The Conclude Consultancy from surgical procedure duration data across European hospitals identifies that without systematic data collection at detailed procedure level, there will always be a high degree of procedure duration variability.

TCC-CASEMIX (TM) addresses this need with novel real-time data capture technologies designed for use in operating theatres.

Data captured from these technologies is then stored in a sophisticated database of surgical procedures. The database runs automated machine learning algorithms to produce a detailed statistical analysis of all procedure types. It is these analytics that are then processed in surgical simulations to optimise operating theatre sessions.

Now for the first time, it will be possible to optimise the case-mix for theatre sessions using a robust evidence-based dataset. As a technology founded on open standards and fully compliant with international standards of procedure coding, no other ‘current-state-of the -art’ commercial solution today can come anywhere close to what is being offered by the new business.