How the fight against COVID-19 is transforming data reporting
The latest emergency management technology is improving data collection and quality.
The potential for a COVID-19 outbreak to quickly consume a hospital’s resources has put data tracking at the center of response efforts. Ongoing analysis of this information produced alarming results in mid-November, as daily COVID-19 hospitalization counts reached new highs and a widening geographic spread touched remote regions that were largely spared in earlier surges.
Healthcare workers at community hospitals around the country are working tirelessly to meet the challenge, but increasingly widespread outbreaks are straining staffing programs that had enabled hospitals in hard-hit areas to borrow skilled workers from regions experiencing less demand.
Whether at the local, regional or national level, accurate, real-time information is vital for the efficient deployment of people and resources that can be stretched thin in short order. That’s why hospitals must report COVID-19 data and track their response efforts, not only to inform decision-making by their own administrators but also to help public health authorities, emergency response organizations, and insurers who rely on that information to stay one step ahead of the virus.
Data collection can be a tall order for hospital staff, who are frequently overwhelmed by the massive amount of information they are compelled to provide on a day-to-day basis. Expanded reporting requirements can be particularly challenging for smaller hospital systems and in rural communities with fewer resources than their urban counterparts.
As a result, more and more healthcare organizations embrace technology to help their teams collect and report COVID-19 data. In most cases, however, these systems provide far more than reporting assistance: The better platforms on the market are designed to help organizations manage emergencies and mass casualty incidents, track patients and medical surge, provide pre-hospital notifications from emergency medical services teams en route, mitigate accreditation risk, and streamline reporting to enable documentation for reimbursement.
That means the widespread upgrading of hospital technology to better handle challenges related to the current pandemic is positioning the healthcare industry for unprecedented levels of data analysis and visibility into public health trends to better manage future incidents.
Platform-driven improvements in data reporting
To understand how the use of the latest emergency management technology is improving data collection and quality, it helps to consider characteristics and functions that major platforms offer, and to look at how healthcare personnel and organizations are using those features in response to COVID-19.
A basic tenet of emergency response planning is to create workflows and define repeatable processes for implementing safeguards and response activities. Since the start of the pandemic, for example, hospitals have modified operational and clinical protocols to ensure patient and staff safety.
A hospital that includes routine events, incident responses, and other workflows into a cloud-based management system can automatically remind employees to perform tasks and let them confirm completion of each step via an app on their mobile device. Accessibility from mobile devices can enhance compliance (by way of their convenience) and help collect timely data that gives administrators a real-time perspective on the status of prevention and incident-response measures.
Hospitals’ advancements in data collection since the start of the pandemic will probably become industry norms that outlast the pandemic. That’s because some systems that hospitals are using to standardize reporting and automate data collection related to the crisis can also be used to achieve greater efficiency in overall hospital operations.
Standardization, another feature of the COVID-19 response, is improving hospitals’ ability to coordinate and collaborate with other agencies such as public health departments, emergency management agencies, and first responders. Emergency management systems seek to provide an orderly framework that helps responders coordinate their actions across geographies and communication mediums, bridging the technology and jargon that can separate hospitals, agencies, private companies, and volunteer organizations. These disparate groups respond to outbreaks and developments in concert by using shared, standardized forms and terminology, and by communicating over-established channels that also feed into emergency response platforms.
Every step in the process generates data that is collected automatically by emergency management technology or harvested from linked systems at hospitals and other sources of key metrics. The standardization used in emergency response efforts, such as the response to COVID-19, makes that data more suitable for apples-to-apples comparisons that produce high-quality results.
Even with automatic submission of high-quality data, the volume of information involved in tracking public health and safety trends demands visualization tools that are up to the task of organizing and processing that data. The latest emergency management solutions provide rapid analysis and intuitive dashboard interfaces that help users quickly isolate trends, parse variables or visualize conditions, whether historical or in real-time.
Today’s industry-leading emergency management platforms connect an organization’s data sources to improve communications, enhance information management, and empower preparedness and response professionals to protect people, property, and brands. Hospitals adopting the latest systems are achieving complete situational awareness that will serve them well, not only during the current pandemic but in daily operations and future emergencies.
Sam Klietz is chief client officer at Juvare, which produces emergency preparedness software. He can be reached by sending an email to info@juvare.com.
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