Definitive Healthcare announced that it has developed during their Datavant virtual Pandemic Response Hackathon, a COVID-19 Capacity Predictor map, to predict where US hospitals may become overwhelmed with regard to mechanical ventilators and intensive care unit (ICU) beds.
Even by the most optimistic estimates, the demand for intensive care beds and ventilators is expected to exceed supply as the number of COVID-19 cases increases. Public officials at all levels of the government – as well as healthcare organizations providing these beds and ventilators – will need to determine quickly when and where additional treatment supplies should be channeled. To help solve this, Definitive Healthcare designed this interactive, visual Tableau map of the United States to make it easier to identify where supplies will likely run out, to help officials and organizations allocate resources where they are most needed in time to improve outcomes for patients.
By combining proprietary Definitive Healthcare ICU hospital bed and ventilator availability/utilization data with population density, demographic information, and New York Times COVID-19 cases per day, Definitive Healthcare’s data science team was able to graph supply capacity against predicted cases and hospitalizations by county and state. This information and analysis is being provided to the public to help our country address the growing pandemic.
Users of Definitive Healthcare’s COVID-19 Capacity Predictor can filter to a state and/or county of interest. Based on the filters a user applies, information is provided about that area’s total available treatment resources (beds, ventilators), as well as projected days until current resources in the health care system are maxed out.
“Because this data can be viewed at a national, state, and county level, we believe our dashboard can be leveraged by officials at all levels of government and the public to plan resource distribution and understand potential ramifications. It has been a truly fulfilling endeavor enabling those decisions to be as data driven as possible,” continued Sanders. “We’re grateful for Definitive Healthcare’s willingness to allow us to use its data on health system capacity and proud to add that data to the growing national discourse.”
