COVID-19 has presented hospitals with challenges unlike anything ever seen before. Not only do hospital staff need to understand how many and which patients have tested positive for COVID-19, but they also need to understand local trends for capacity planning and resource utilization, as well as finances for reimbursement.
In Puerto Rico, as in other areas of the United States, there are questions about the number of COVID-19 tests being conducted and whether there are enough, as well as the consistency of reporting numbers to the government. Hospital de la Concepción, based in San Germán, is a world-class hospital in southwestern Puerto Rico that is using Dimensional Insight in its effort to respond to the challenges from COVID-19. Let’s take a look.
A look at the data being collected
Hospital de la Concepción has been using Dimensional Insight’s analytics platform since 2019 to help it better understand its hospital and emergency department operations. Dimensional Insight’s Measure Factory technology creates measures or KPIs from the data it receives from different source systems, such as the hospital’s MEDITECH EHR. Measure Factory validates all data and ensures that staff, clinicians, and administrators are all looking at the same data in the same way.
Hospital de la Concepción wanted Dimensional Insight to help it:
- Make sure it was well-prepared to handle COVID-19 cases within its hospital, by having accurate and up-to-date numbers on capacity and utilization of beds, ventilators, ICU units, and isolation units.
- See which cities have suspected or confirmed COVID-19 cases.
- Have accurate statistics on positive test rates, recovery rates, and mortality rates, by demographic.
- Ensure it was sending accurate numbers to the government.
The COVID-19 specific dashboard that Dimensional Insight created was designed to provide continuous updates on data points such as ventilator, bed, ICU, and isolation room capacity and utilization, and positive test rates, recovery rates, and mortality rates. It also included a map of cities that have suspected or confirmed COVID-19 cases, so staff could understand where in the community the greatest virus spread was, and it allowed the hospital to meet government reporting requirements, which is necessary for reimbursements.
The dashboard currently updates new cases every hour, and hospital staff are able to see where in the hospital COVID-positive patients are located. The hospital’s medical team uses the dashboard for its daily status call, and the nursing director uses it to relay information to the nursing teams.
A leader in its COVID-19 response
Juan Caban Medina, director of the information systems department at Hospital de la Concepción, says, “We have been leading the process of handling COVID-19, not just because we work successfully with the highest volume of cases in the region, but also because we have the tools, staff, and process in place to keep our patients, employees, and medical faculty safe.”
Caban Medina says the measures and analytics provided by Dimensional Insight are incredibly valuable, because as rules and definitions change, the Dimensional Insight software easily allows for change and enables staff to analyze the data from different perspectives.
He also says the consistency and trust provided by the validated measures ensure that everyone in the organization has the same picture of what is going on in the hospital. Because staff uses one set of data from which they make decisions, they don’t need to worry that different departments are looking at data in slightly different ways.
Learn more
To learn more about how Hospital de la Concepción is using Dimensional Insight in its response to COVID-19, please download our case study.
Kathy started her career in television news writing and producing. She then worked at a public relations agency and as a freelance writer before joining Dimensional Insight in 2013.
Kathy has presented at several events in both healthcare and wine & spirits, including the Healthcare Innovation Summit, the Healthcare IT Marketing & PR Conference (HITMC), and the WSWA Women’s Leadership Council (WLC) Conference. Kathy is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and a member of Women of the Vine & Spirits.
She is also host of the Smarter Healthcare Podcast (www.smarthcpodcast.com) and is a member of the Forbes Communications Council.
Kathy holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Boston University.
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