There is no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic affected people’s lives and changed how businesses operate. But it has also popularized analytics concepts. There are public discussions of projection models and trends showing case volumes and other relevant metrics. The general public is even now more familiar with healthcare dashboards, as many refer to the popular Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboards and others.
While healthcare companies had no choice but to work in an uncertain environment, analytics teams have stepped up to meet the need for insight to help manage this crisis. They support healthcare leaders in planning and implementing effective strategies to respond to the challenges brought up by the pandemic without jeopardizing patient care.
We applaud these teams which often work behind the scenes and would like to mention just a few examples of how they contributed to healthcare operations during the coronavirus pandemic.
For executives to stay informed during this health crisis, data visualizations are necessary to identify where and how to step in to improve patient care. Analytics teams are helping keep the focus on COVID-19 patients by retooling existing dashboards and adding more data points to understand the status of the pandemic. Detailed and specific information related to the daily cases led to better reporting over time. Redefining healthcare KPIs was a must so that they would be more reliable and accurate by encompassing the number of cases, visits, death rates, discharges, and other related measures. This also means:
The uncertainties and challenges brought up by this crisis often demanded that reporting teams adopt agile responses to deliver actionable insight for protecting staff, improving quality of care, and making efficient management and financial decisions.
To help achieve service quality in terms of availability, cost, and timeliness, executives turned to analytics teams to:
This task is not easy because COVID-19 testing is occurring in new settings such as drive-thru centers, tents, and parking lots which complicates results’ mining.
PPE was at one point the only way healthcare workers could protect themselves from the virus. With the increased number of cases, healthcare organizations needed to manage these resources. Therefore, analytics teams have generated operational reports to understand the availability and usage of PPE(s):
In addition to PPE usage reports, analytics teams also provided critical operational reports to support discharge planning, hospital capacity management, and patient flow management. All contributed to an increase in COVID-19 bed availability.
Reporting case volumes to the CDC and other public agencies is a necessary initiative to keep the public informed and aware of any progress achieved. Healthcare organizations turned to analytics teams to:
The reports prepared showed hospital capacity. Some of the reported data include hospital bed occupancy, mechanical ventilators usage, confirmed positive COVID-19 cases, E/D overflow, and PPE usage.
As reopening allowed for increased access to outpatient clinics and other hospital services, tracking revenue recovery is needed. Analytics teams develop dashboards that encompass financial metrics such as margins, cost savings, and other related metrics that could help executives monitor and set new target recovery revenue strategies. As we all know, COVID-19 pandemic enabled new ways to care for patients that organizations must adapt to and survive without compromising profit. Therefore, analytic teams empowered executives with analytics for a smoother pivot, monitoring and adoption of online and Telehealth services.
Data scientists created dynamic models to adapt to the unforeseen effects of this crisis with quantitative projections that assisted in the planning and allocation of resources. Some of the challenges they had to overcome while applying advanced analytics during this pandemic include:
We applaud analytics teams that have served and continue to perform behind the scenes to provide the insight needed to manage the current public health crisis. As tragic as the pandemic is, it does highlight how critical it is to deliver the right insight at the right time. It can not only help healthcare run more efficiently, but also save lives.