Submitter
William Nieczpiel, System Director, Analytics and Reporting
Company
Main Line Health
Industry
Healthcare
Business Challenge
The coronavirus pandemic introduced a need to be able to classify and evaluate the COVID patient population through multiple perspectives. This included regional surveillance, planning through utilization of predictive models, and monitoring trends within the health system. Main Line Health (MLH) rapidly developed a COVID dashboard for the command center to provide real-time information to support decision making.
Analytics Solution
The health system operational management dashboards are typically utilized to satisfy patient flow and assist with staffing models. MLH utilized technologies to bring together numerous data sources with varying refresh intervals to present operational perspectives from a single COVID dashboard. Knowing the requirements were quickly evolving, we adopted an agile development approach to allow for timely updates and enhancements. The dashboard is utilized by all organizational leadership levels and featured on the nightly communication to staff. Data sources included Epic (every 15 minutes), Cisco Contact Center (daily), Peoplesoft (weekly), and Congregate Living Location (external one-time). Technologies used include AWS for data management, Tableau for visualization, ESRi for geocoding, and Python for scripting.
Impact
MLH implemented a custom-built operational COVID dashboard that allowed for an “at a glance” view to assist in decision-making throughout the pandemic’s evolution. Surveillance was initially utilized to measure the impact and hot spots of the virus by regional zip codes. That same geographic view was later applied to community congregate living facilities as outbreaks were discovered. This quickly evolved into a real-time view of each hospital’s census to evaluate capacity across the health system and the setup/implementation of surge plans. Additionally, lab result turnaround times were monitored to determine where best to direct testing. Staffing plans were assessed and evaluated daily by utilizing employee exposure call volumes. Finally, historical views were created to show trends over time including three-day rolling averages to smooth out daily variations.