UChicago Medicine’s data-driven response to COVID-19

Data has always been central to operations at UChicago Medicine, a leading academic medical center with more than 1,200 beds across four in-patient facilities in the Chicagoland area.

While hospital leadership prepared UChicago Medicine's operational response to COVID-19, there was an urgent and large demand for new data and reporting. Tasked with continuing to enable leadership, clinicians, and administrators to make the most data-driven decisions possible, the UChicago Medicine Data & Analytics team needed to quickly create new dashboards. Partnerships across clinical care, analytics, and IT sought to leverage existing data infrastructure to provide the most meaningful COVID-19 reporting possible for the organization. These included:

• COVID-19 Real-Time Status: Provides up-to-the minute statuses of confirmed and potential COVID-19 patients in the hospital, along with testing updates. Operational and Infection leadership use this to have a real-time pulse of the demand that COVID-19 is placing on the health system.
• Census by COVID-19: Tracks trends in census and mechanical ventilator utilization, sorted by COVID-19 status. This helps operational and ICU leadership monitor and plan resource utilization.
• COVID-19 Workflow Timing: Tracks care timelines from the first moment a patient is investigated for infection to when they receive a Confirmed or Cleared test result. This information helps the hospital minimize the exposure of potentially infected patients while making the best use of respiratory precautions and PPE.
• COVID-19 Patient Outcomes: Breaks out patient admission and discharges per day, average lengths of stay, patient percentages requiring ICU, and deaths per week. Care teams and administrators can filter the data by various operational and demographic parameters to identify potential variation in patient outcomes.
• COVID-19 ICU Outcomes: Tracks the percentage of patients admitted to the ICU, how long they stay, whether they progress positively or need to return, and whether they use mechanical ventilation. This information helps ICU personnel and hospital leadership track the timing of various ICU-related outcomes.
• COVID-19 Testing: Tracks overall diagnostic testing progress and results, including the total number of patients tested for infection and the total number who have tested positive. Care teams and administrators use the information to perform comparative analysis on volumes and positivity rates across various patient populations.

To create these dashboards, the UChicago Medicine Data & Analytics team partnered with IT, Infection Control, ICU clinicians, and operational leadership to prioritize data needs and ensure the reporting being developed provided immediate value. While this effort and collaboration continues today, this suite of reporting has quickly become UChicago Medicine's most viewed internal reporting. The first wave of dashboards was developed over the course of a few weeks, but the team has continued to enhance and develop reporting as the organization's COVID-19 response evolves.

UChicago Medicine has made starter kit versions of these dashboards available for other healthcare organizations to download and customize for their own purposes. Each jumpstart dashboard includes pre-designed desktop and mobile-friendly visualizations connected to placeholder data sources. (Please note that none of the data presented in these reflect current or past patient outcomes at UChicago Medicine.) Other institutions can download these dashboards and replace the placeholder data with connections to their own data sources. The jumpstarts also include links for contacting the UChicago Medicine Data & Analytics team with any questions, feedback, or notes of success.

To download a jumpstart dashboard for use in your health system (Tableau Desktop required), visit the UChicago Medicine page on Tableau Public.