The basics
In many cases, the data you want to use for forecasting lives in another system. Patient support might live in an external ticketing system. Appointments might live in an external booking system. Async encounters might exist in an external EMR.
In general, the approach is to first sync that data with an appropriate table in Planbase, typically tickets or activities (appointments are a specific type of activity).
Tickets — used to model discrete units of work that arrive and need to be completed, such as support tickets, tasks, cases, messages, or async encounters. They typically have a created time, a completed (or resolved) time and an assigned to field.
Activities — used to model scheduled or completed blocks of work associated with a person, such as appointments, calls, or other scheduled clinical work. They typically have a start and end time and can be used to understand when work took place and how much time it required. Learn more about activities here.
Your Planbase account team can help determine the appropriate data model for your integration. Once the data is in Planbase, follow the configuration steps in Configuring forecasts to set up your forecast.
Native integrations
Planbase has native integrations with many external systems, including:
EMRs — Athena, Medplum, Healthie, etc.
Booking systems — Acuity, Cal.com, etc.
Ticketing systems — Intercom, Salesforce, Zendesk, Zoho, etc.
In these cases, Planbase will work with your IT team to connect the integration, map the relevant resources into Planbase, and keep historical data flowing on an ongoing basis.
Once synced, you can link that integration source when configuring a time-series forecast and filter the data with include/exclude keywords as described in Configuring forecasts.
Non-native integrations
Many Planbase customers work with homegrown systems, or with systems that do not expose a usable API. In those cases, there are two common approaches:
Data warehouse sync — Work with Planbase to expose the relevant tables through a data warehouse such as Snowflake. Planbase can then sync that data into tickets or activities on a recurring schedule.
Direct upload via API — Upload tickets, activities, or forecast predictions and actuals directly through the Planbase API (including the Forecasts API for volumes and staffing requirements).
Your account team will work with you to choose the right approach, define the field mappings, and validate that historical and ongoing data land in the correct Planbase tables before you configure forecasting.
Next steps
Once your external data is flowing into Planbase, configure your forecasts using Configuring forecasts.
To view predicted volumes and requirements, and to compare them against actuals, see Viewing Your Forecasts.
For concepts like time-series vs driver-based forecasting, volumes vs requirements, and predictions vs actuals, see Getting started with forecasting.