RAEDFAST

Designed and tested by NHS planners

Raedfast has been designed and developed by experienced NHS planning consultants, and refined through more than 30 client projects over many years.

The great majority of NHS strategic plans are invested in spreadsheets, but this substantial iterative investment in Raedfast has delivered a powerful application which is superior across-the-board to a spreadsheet solution.

We know from first-hand experience how easy it is for a planner to modify Raedfast for a range of purposes, from individual practice budgets to 25 year strategic planning for whole health economies.

Bring everything together in a single model

Excel solutions are often constrained to handle different services separately in different worksheets, making it difficult to create cross-service outputs. Raedfast handles Acute, Community, Primary Care and Social Services in a single model and presents the output in a single pivot table.

This single model encompasses Demand, Capacity, Estates, Manpower and Finance projections.

The scope of the model can range from the entire NHS, through ICBs to PCNs, GP Practices and Provider Trusts.

Change what you need, quickly and easily

Complex Excel models are notoriously difficult to adapt, because changes involve writing and rewriting often complex formulae which impact on existing formulae in ways which are themselves complex and obscure. With Raedfast almost any required change can be made simply and rapidly, without the need to code any formulae.

Such changes include:

• changing the level of detail at which you model

• introducing a new model dimension or measure

• creating new steps in the model, to open up new areas of modelling

• pro-rating to match a previously agreed planned output whilst keeping integrity at lower levels

• loading new data

• adding a new model scenario

Changes are made by planners themselves, using point-and-click, and Raedfast automatically adjusts the existing model to the changes.

Movement between one POD and another, or between one Site and another, is easily handled, and the layering of interdependent assumptions is automatic — two issues which are particularly hard to handle in Excel. So Raedfast automatically applies (for example) the impact of demand changes on new models of care, and of both on shifts to new provider locations.

Work top-down or bottom-up

Enter historic activity as a baseline data set and extrapolate the future from the historic baseline.

Or drive assumptions from segmented population data using whatever rates you wish (e.g. national median referral rates, upper-quartile length-of-stay, etc.).

Excel models are constrained to a high level, because they cannot handle the volume of records (often tens of millions) generated by more detailed models. In a high-level plan it can be difficult for a clinician looking at the plan to see how they are supposed to put the plan into action: they need to see age bands, specialties, lengths-of-stay and so on. Raedfast can provide this detail, so a Raedfast model is an executable plan, not just a forecast. At the same time, reporting the same data at a higher level gives Trust Boards the overview they need.

With Raedfast you can enter assumptions at any level, broad-brushing the straightforward areas, and fine-tuning the sensitivities, both within the same model. The system automatically pro-rates the impact of all assumptions to the lowest level, so that analysis can cut model output by any number and combination of fields, regardless of the level at which assumptions were entered.

Explain the output to stakeholders

Every number in Raedfast model output can be broken out into the model steps which have built it up — so much from model baseline, so much from each of various demand changes, so much from efficiency measures, so much from new models of care, and so on:

Compare multiple scenarios

Clip together different combinations of model steps to build alternative Scenarios, and enable different possible futures to be compared.

Plan without brick walls

Raedfast uses a unique Add, Move, Multiply methodology.

The planner constructs the model as a series of steps. Each step Adds to (subtracts from) a cohort of patients; or Moves a cohort of patients; or Multiplies (divides) a measure by standard ratios to derive another measure. For example:

• You might Add a given percentage to emergency admissions

• You might Move paediatric surgery from one provider site to another

• You might calculate the number of modelled consultant WTEs in ordinary elective wards by Multiplying the number of modelled beds by a given value

The planner decides what the steps are, how many steps there will be, and which cohorts of patients are affected by each.

Like Lego® but for planners, Raedfast lets you build sophisticated models from the repeated use of simple building blocks, making no assumptions about the plan you want to construct, and imposing no limits.

Handle incomplete and poor-quality data

Data loaded from external systems can be supplemented by manually entered data, so that the model has a complete picture of the organisation. Manual data can be entered at an aggregate level, and pro-rated automatically to the base of the model.

Raedfast modelling functions can be applied to correct and complete input data. For example activity might be moved to up-to-date Treatment Function Codes, or missing primary care data might be approximated as an adjustment of outpatient data.

Work closely with Excel (but don’t abuse it)

Raedfast recognises that Excel is the normal working environment for planners.

The system is tightly integrated with Excel for loading data, editing assumptions, building dimensions and analysing model outputs.

But we do not attempt to use Excel for a purpose for which it is fundamentally unsuited, which is as a structured database to hold the model itself.

Analyse with Excel, Power BI, Qlik, Tableau, Python, R, etc.

Raedfast uses an industry-standard SQL Server database to which all analytical tools connect.

So you can analyse model output using your analytical tool of choice.