Key takeaways
- A census forecast gives you a predicted bed count by facility and unit for each day of a horizon you choose, refreshed as new admissions and discharges arrive.
- A large healthcare provider runs a 15-day census forecast in production across every facility in North America.
- H2O Driverless AI automates the time series feature engineering and model search, and explains which drivers moved each forecast.
- Protected health information never has to leave your boundary across four deployment options.
You staff today for patients who arrive next week
Your staffing grid, your agency requests and your elective schedule are all set days before the patients who fill them arrive. When the plan rests on last year's average and a charge nurse's instinct, the gap shows up as boarding in the emergency department, delayed discharges and unbudgeted overtime.
Most health systems already run some form of census report, but it looks backward, one facility at a time, and rarely reaches the unit level where staffing decisions are made. A forecast that covers every facility, every unit and every day of the horizon gives operations, patient flow and nursing leadership the same view of demand.