How Data Transforms the Hospital Command Center to Pandemic Proportions

How Data Transforms the Hospital Command
Center to Pandemic Proportions
David Grauer, MBA, MHSA
David Gardiner, MBA, MHA, MPH

© 2020 Health Catalyst
Proprietary. Feel free to share but we would appreciate a Health Catalyst citation.
Transforming the Hospital Command Center
With typical hospital command center
planning, organizations and teams
prepare for short- and mid-term
emergency responses.
Major weather-related events, such as
flooding, earthquakes or hurricanes, or
even multivehicle collisions and
shootings all have the potential to cause
rapid patient influx and require significant
hospital response.

But, events like these usually have an
identifiable starting and stopping point,
mostly requiring only basic data and
analytics for impact forecasting.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, is
driving the need for a command center
strategy to handle a mid- or long-term
event with no known endpoint, calling for
unique planning and advanced data and
analytics support.

The long duration, high transmission risks,
and massive scope of impact of the novel
coronavirus are driving more complex
facility, equipment, and staffing needs than
U.S. hospitals have ever addressed.
With no roadmap or recent events on
which to base a pandemic-ready command
center strategy, health systems need to
leverage data-driven tools to scale their
existing emergency response plans to
COVID-19 crisis proportions.

Patient care, disease control, and,
eventually, recovery will rest on
health systems’ ability to address a
bigger, more fluid situation than
leaders and team members have
trained in or experienced.
Scaling the response will necessarily
focus on the areas of highest impact:
clinical capacity, equipment, and
staffing and rely on comprehensive,
accurate, and accessible data.

A New Command Center Anatomy:
Scaling for Mid- and Long-Term Events
In the shift from short- to mid-/long-term
emergency response, the service orientation
and data projection needs change over time
to forecasting extended capacity implications,
equipment utilization, and staffing needs.
The command center focus transitions from
the immediate action of, “who’s here now,
what do we expect over the next few days,
and how are we going to staff and provide
equipment and supplies?” to a prolonged and
more comprehensive look at the same
essential elements.

Due to the sustained duration of a mid- to
long-term event, the emergency response
requires more complex management than
its short-term counterpart.
Extended demands and a steady flow of
critically ill patients require the command
center to move to a virtual platform and
demand complex analytics.

Care shifts from urgent/emergent to more
chronic and more extended-term needs—
for example, moving the focus from trauma
surgery and Emergency Medical Services-
related rescue care to ventilated patients
and ICU-related acuity.

The Principle Data Needs of the COVID-19
Hospital Command Center
Regardless of scale, the right information
and data is operational currency for
hospital command centers.
Emergency planners use projections and
sophisticated algorithms to continuously
project what’s coming next, how to
respond best, and how to prioritize
actions and resources.
Because inaccurate information leads to
incorrect estimations, a command center
response, and the eventual outcome, is
only as good as the data behind it.

Emergency response leaders can plan to
scale their typical command centers to meet
pandemic needs by leveraging tools that
derive insight from predictive models (e.g.,
disease progression, services and supply
utilization, and identification of at-risk
populations).
These insights assess the impact and help
the organization plan for longer-terms needs
related to capacity, equipment, and staffing.

Reliable data and analytics in the following key areas support command
center scaling for COVID-19 needs:
Capacity
Planning
Patient and
Staff Contact
Tracking
Analytics
Response
Disease
Surveillance
COVID-19
National
Registry
Analytics
Accelerators

Capacity Planning
COVID-19 has created intense pressures
on hospital capacity, and the overflow has
pushed patients to hallways, tents, hospital
ships, convention centers, and more
locations beyond the typical care setting.
In the meantime, health systems must still
register all patients, and track distributed
patients to properly document patient care,
monitor the disease as well as recover
costs or lost revenue (e.g., to obtain
federal recovery funding).

Capacity Planning
An epidemiologically-driven capacity
planning tool (Figure 1), such as the
Health Catalyst® Capacity Planning Tool,
part of the organization’s COVID-19
response, forecasts community-level
pandemic-related demand in the context
of a system’s capacity, supplies, and
staffing—and the subsequent impact of
infection rates on care delivery capacity.
Command center leaders can use this
insight to set expectations and inform an
overflow mitigation strategy.

Projected number of available COVID-19 beds, accounting for admits and discharges
KEY
Total COVID-19 Beds
exhausted on Apr 27
ICU COVID-19 Beds
exhausted on Apr 22
COVID-19 Ventilators
exhausted on Apr 16
Figure 1 : A sample visualization of a capacity planning tool.

Patient and Staff Contact Tracking
With the high contagion rates of COVID-19,
understanding contact history among patients
and hospital staff (i.e., who may have risked
exposure to the virus) is a vital component of a
response strategy, informing testing, quarantine
efforts, and decontamination activities.
Health systems can use a monitoring tool (e.g.,
the Health Catalyst® Patient and Staff Contact
Tracker) to access reports that track the location
and interactions of patients and staff with
confirmed or suspected COVID-19.

Analytics Response
An effective pandemic response requires
timely, accurate data to generate quick
insights for critical decision making.
The Health Catalyst® Rapid Response
Analytics Solution™ for COVID-19 features
quickly accessible prebuilt, curated,
reusable data content (DOS™ Marts),
including continually updated COVID-19
codes and value sets.

Analytics Response
Command center teams can add new
data to their source systems via the
Instant Data Entry Application (IDEA).
They can then leverage the Population
Builder™: Stratification Module to build
COVID-19 disease registries swiftly
and create, visualize, share, and monitor
COVID-19 dashboards using the
Leading Wisely® application.

Disease Surveillance
Emergency response to the novel
coronavirus makes the complete data
story for the disease more significant
than ever.
By monitoring COVID-19 infections
beginning at the initial point of contact
within the healthcare organization (e.g.,
ED registration), providers can identify
and flag unusual symptom/clinical test
patterns that could represent illness.

Disease Surveillance
A public health application that leverages
a comprehensive analytics platform can
perform enhanced biosurveillance
monitoring and analytics, enabling a quick
and effective public health response.
With a tool such as the Health Catalyst®
Patient Safety Monitor™ Application:
Public Health, hospital epidemiologists
and infection control personnel can
perform local, rapid, and preliminary
assessments of patient-level clinical data.

A COVID-19 National Registry
A national COVID-19 registry enables a
deep understanding of COVID-19
treatments and outcomes, making a
critical part of a long-term emergency
response.
The Health Catalyst® Touchstone™
COVID-19 National Data Sets and
Registry (Figure 2), for example,
consists of three patient types: high-risk
patients; patients suspected of being
infected, but not confirmed; confirmed
COVID-19 patients.

Touchstone Dataset
In the next few months data from
clients will grow to include:
• ~100M Patients
• ~500 Hospitals
• ~1000 Health Plans
Touchstone includes 3rd party data from ~150M patients, including national surveillance datasets
related to COVID-19.
Figure 2 : The Touchstone COVID-19 Dataset.

Organizations can use the registry to
derive insights about surveillance,
testing, capacity planning, and treatment
response to deepen and accelerate their
understanding of the outbreak.
With registry-driven insights, health
systems can inform care pathways for
patient management and outcomes
improvement during recovery, as well as
identify indicators to inform clinical trial
design, feasibility, and recruitment.

Analytics Accelerators
Analytics accelerators, tools that
health systems can implement and
configure quickly, help organizations
meet the clinical, operational, and
financial challenges of COVID-19.

Analytics accelerators, tools that health
systems can implement and configure
quickly, help organizations meet the
clinical, operational, and financial
challenges of COVID-19. By providing
decision-making insights, the following
types of accelerators help organizations
prepare for and respond to, as well as
recover from, COVID-19:

By providing decision-making insights, the
following types of accelerators help
organizations prepare for and respond to, as
well as recover from, COVID-19:
Practice Management: Patient Access.
Readmissions Explorer.
Blood Utilization.
Supply Chain Explorer.
Infection-Related Analytics Accelerators.
>
>
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An Outsized Crisis Requires an Outsized
Data-Driven Response
Health systems’ best emergency response to
the novel coronavirus pandemic is to take
what they know in the form of their customary
command centers and scale them to
unprecedented levels.
Organizations can meet these new volume
and impact challenges by fully leveraging
data and expanding their insight and analytic
competencies.

An Outsized Crisis Requires an Outsized
Data-Driven Response
With advanced analytics-driven COVID-19
response tools and informed decision
making, health systems can transform their
emergency frameworks for the outsized
proportions and agility a pandemic requires.

For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
How Data Transforms the Hospital Command Center to Pandemic Proportions
Rapid Response Analytics Improves COVID-19 Incident Management Effectiveness
Health Catalyst Success Story
COVID-19 Dashboard Enables Effective Incident Command
Analytics Accelerates COVID-19 Elective Surgery Restart
Responding and Recovering in Clinic Operations with Advanced Analytics
Health Systems Share COVID-19 Financial Recovery Strategies in First Client Huddle
Health Catalyst Editors

David Grauer comes to Health Catalyst after 23 years in executive leadership positions at
Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based, not-for-profit system of 22 hospitals, 185 clinics,
and 1,400 employed physicians that is widely recognized as a leader in clinical quality
improvement and in efficient healthcare delivery. For the last nine years, Grauer served as
CEO/Administrator of Intermountain Medical Center, a 502-bed hospital in suburban Salt
Lake City that is both Utah’s largest hospital and the flagship of Intermountain Healthcare.
Previously, he was CEO/Administrator of two other Intermountain hospitals: Cottonwood
Hospital and TOSH—The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital.
Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
David Grauer, MBA, MHSA

David
David Gardiner, MBA, MHA, MPH

Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing, analytics and outcomes-improvement
company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes improve clinical, financial, and operational
outcomes needed to improve population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data
warehouse (EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in
support of more than 65 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system
to forward-thinking physician practices.
Health Catalyst was recently named as the leader in the enterprise healthcare BI market in
improvement by KLAS, and has received numerous best-place-to work awards including Modern
Healthcare in 2013, 2014, and 2015, as well as other recognitions such as “Best Place to work for
Millenials, and a “Best Perks for Women.”

How Data Transforms the Hospital Command Center to Pandemic Proportions

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