The basics
ℹ️ To access forecasting, click Forecasts in the left sidebar. The top chart shows historical and predicted volumes for each forecast. The bottom chart shows staffing requirements needed to meet any configured SLAs.
A forecast predicts the volume of a specific type of work you’ll receive and how many people are required to handle it. Forecasts can be used across both clinical and non-clinical work and can be as broad or granular as needed. For example, initial CA visits, inbound billing queries, or urgent care visits.
In other systems, similar concepts may be referred to as a queue or workstream.
Planbase supports two types of forecasting. In either case, you can generate forecasts natively in Planbase or upload your own:
Time Series Forecast — Uses historical data to predict future demand and determine staffing needs. Planbase can build time-series forecasts natively using your stored historical data on appointments or tickets.
Driver-Based Forecast — Uses known operational drivers from your care model or go-to-market motion to build a bottom-up forecast of future demand and staffing needs. Driver-based forecasts can be built and imported from a Planbase custom app.
The right forecasting approach depends on the nature of the work. For an urgent care team, where demand varies over time and historical patterns are informative, a time-series forecast is likely to be most accurate. For an outbound enrollment team, where workload is driven by known populations and outreach processes, a driver-based forecast is likely to be more accurate.
Volumes vs Staffing Requirements
To build and optimize schedules around expected demand or to plan for longer-term capacity you need to know not just how much future work to expect, but also how many people are required to service that work.
Planbase represents this with two separate data concepts:
Volumes — the amount of work expected in each interval. For a time-series forecast, this might be predicted appointments, calls, or tickets. For a driver-based forecast, volume may instead be calculated mechanically from your care model or operating assumptions, for example, the number of follow-up visits implied by a known patient population.
Requirements — the number of people actually needed to handle the expected work in a given interval. This is ultimately what gets consumed downstream for scheduling and capacity planning.
For a time series forecast, Planbase offers staffing calculations for both real-time and asynchronous work. For real-time work, this can include Erlang-based models that account for factors such as handle time and target service levels. For asynchronous work, requirements can account for incoming volume, existing backlog, handle time, productivity, and target completion SLAs.
For some driver-based forecasts, volumes may not be generated at all, with staffing requirements instead calculated directly from the underlying operating model.
Actuals vs Predictions
Regardless of whether you are using a time-series forecast, a driver-based forecast, or both, you want to understand how well your forecast is performing by comparing what you predicted with what actually happened.
Planbase distinguishes between:
Predictions — what you expected to happen.
Actuals — what actually happened.
This distinction applies to both volumes and staffing requirements. Comparing actuals with predictions helps you understand forecast accuracy, identify where your assumptions may need to change, and improve future forecasts. For time-series forecasts, actuals can also become the historical data used to generate future predictions.
Planbase provides reporting tools to compare actuals against predictions over time, measure forecast accuracy, and understand where and why actual demand or staffing requirements differed from predictions.
| Prediction | Actual | Required? |
Volume | How much work you expect to receive | How much work actually was there | No — some driver-based forecasts calculate requirements directly |
Requirement | How many people you expect to need | How many people were actually required | Yes — Planbase uses these for scheduling and capacity planning |
Next steps
To bring external volume data into Planbase, see Connecting External Data for Forecasting.
To set up a forecast, see Configuring forecasts.
To view predicted volumes and requirements, and compare them against actuals, see Viewing Your Forecasts.