IndustriesHealthcare
Three per cent
of the pathway
is treatment.
Clinical quality improvement focuses on the minutes a clinician is with the patient. Almost all of the elapsed time — and most of the cost, the risk and the complaints — sits in the gaps between stages, where no single department is accountable.
The green slivers are the entire clinical contribution. Everything else is a handover waiting for a decision, a slot or a result. Shortening a consultation by five minutes changes nothing on this chart; removing four days from diagnostics changes it visibly.
Cost per episode
Measured, not allocated
Most costing in healthcare divides a departmental budget by a caseload and calls the result a cost per episode. That number cannot tell you which pathway to change, because it was never built from what actually happened to a patient.
When consumables decrement real stock against the episode, theatre minutes post from the scheduling record, and clinician time comes from the roster, the figure is assembled rather than apportioned.
| Component | Derived from | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Theatre time | Scheduling record · 94 min | 1,410 |
| Clinical staff | Roster and grade mix | 880 |
| Consumables | Stock issued to the episode | 612 |
| Implant | Serialised, traced to the patient | 2,340 |
| Diagnostics | Orders raised on the pathway | 385 |
| Bed days | Admission and discharge events | 1,120 |
| Follow-up | Appointments attended | 190 |
Every line traces to a record somebody created while doing their job. Nothing here is a percentage of an overhead pool, which is why a variance between two surgeons performing the same procedure is a question worth asking rather than an artefact of the model.
Running the service
The constraint is a room
with a clinician in it.
Schedule against the scarce resource
A theatre or a clinic room with the right staffing is the limit, not the appointment book. Lists are built against room, staff mix, equipment and turnaround, so an over-booked list is refused rather than discovered on the day.
Cancellations have a named cause
Every cancelled slot records why and who. A month of lost capacity becomes a ranked list of fixable causes instead of a percentage in a board report.
Implants and consumables are traceable
Serialised items are bound to the patient and the episode through QRForge, so a recall resolves to named individuals in one query rather than a manual search of theatre logs.
Waiting lists are one list
A patient waiting for diagnostics, a decision and a procedure appears once with a total wait, not three times in three departmental queues that each look reasonable.
Access follows the clinical relationship
Record access is granted by care relationship and role, evaluated at query time and logged. Break-glass access requires a reason and notifies a second person.
Residency is fixed at provisioning
Patient data stays in the jurisdiction chosen at the start, including backups and replicas, and moving it is an explicit logged migration rather than a configuration change.
Questions providers ask
Is this a clinical system?
No, and that distinction matters. FlowZa runs the operational and financial side — scheduling, resources, consumables, procurement, costing, billing and the ledger. The clinical record stays in your EPR, and the two exchange the events each needs. We are not asking you to migrate clinical documentation.
How do you handle payer and insurer billing?
Episodes are coded and priced against the payer's schedule, with rejections returning to a worklist that carries the original episode and the reason. Because the claim is built from the same records as the cost, the margin on a payer contract is visible per procedure rather than at year end.
What about interoperability standards?
HL7 and FHIR interfaces are how the platform exchanges data with clinical systems, and the integration is maintained by us rather than run as middleware by you. Where a national or regional exchange is mandatory, it is treated the same way as a tax clearance regime elsewhere on this platform.