Analytics help hospitals navigate new COVID surges
HOUSTON METHODIST is in the midst of a massive COVID-19 surge, seeing 50% more patients than at the height of its previous surge in the spring and on track to reach more than double that peak.
“We’re probably heading up to at least two to three times what our initial surge was,” said Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s executive vice president and chief innovation officer. “We are definitely surging.”
Texas is one of more than 30 states that are experiencing an increase in COVID-19 cases. The state’s governor June 25 issued an executive order suspending elective surgeries at hospitals in four counties in an effort to ensure there’s capacity for COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Hospitals are increasingly using predictive models to forecast surges and demand, said Gurpreet Singh, health services leader at consulting firm PwC. While many of the predictive models that hospitals used in early stages of the pandemic focused on COVID-19, they’re now adjusting them to forecast demand as they resume other services.
Singh estimated that, before the pandemic, about a quarter of hospitals used analytics to predict demand. It’s now being used in at least half the hospitals he worked with recently.
By looking at its emergency department, admission volumes and the proportion of those patients testing positive for COVID-19, Houston Methodist is using predictive analytics to identify which hospitals are in communities with a growing number of COVID-19 cases and forecast how high the next surge might be.
Renown Health in Reno, Nev., is leveraging its existing data efforts to help predict capacity and patient outcomes. The Renown Institute for Health Innovation, a collaboration between Renown Health and the Reno-based Desert Research Institute, launched the Healthy Nevada Project in 2016. The population health study is designed to better understand how clinical, genetic, social and environmental factors can predict patients’ risks for various conditions. More than 50,000 people in Nevada have volunteered to share DNA samples with the project.
By linking COVID-19 test results to data collected from the project, researchers are working to build models that predict COVID-19 length of stay to better inform hospital capacity. They’re also studying genetic factors that put patients with COVID-19 at risk for severe illness and long-term complications, said Dr. Anthony Slonim, Renown Health’s CEO. ●