Covid-19 created an unprecedented need to manage dramatically increased staffing levels and the huge demand for PPE equipment, ventilators and medication. A solution was needed quickly.
“We needed to deliver an emergency COVID-19 application in as little time as possible. Squirrel helped us deliver that in a record time of just 3 weeks”
Covid-19 created an unprecedented need to manage dramatically increased staffing levels and the huge demand for PPE equipment, ventilators and medication. The healthcare provider had to act fast to make sure they could meet the supply and demand of both staffing and supplies.
Part of the challenge was finding a way to track data that previously was not captured. They urgently needed to track PPE and separate drugs for treating Covid patients at the healthcare facilities. They needed to monitor how many patients tested positive, how many nurses interacted with positive patients, and how many nurses were quarantined.
None of this information had been tracked before.
The business needed a solution to provide up-to-date numbers and to display this for different regions and markets with the ability to drill down to the facility level. With this data available, they could then transfer stock from one facility, that had an abundance, to another that was running short.
Critically, the solution needed to be immediately usable. There was no time to roll out user training programs; the system needed to be in use from the moment it arrived.
The healthcare provider was starting from scratch: not only did they need to build an application to track staffing and supplies, but they also had to put in place a mechanism to record the data that had not previously been captured. And, they had to deliver this in a format that could be easily used and understood by staff in hospitals and day centres.
First of all, they identified what data was needed; this was defined by the operational side of the business. Data from all healthcare facilities was identified and it took into consideration availability at different sites.
Having identified the data they needed, the teams had to consider how to capture this data. It was important to get the application up and running as quickly as possible, so they decided to use a system that the staff were already comfortable with. SharePoint forms were used to pull in the data from each centre on a nightly basis; it relied on each centre to input relevant data at the end of each day.
The captured data was fed into their data warehouse and initial formatting was done using their existing reporting solution. Unfortunately, the output was not suitable to deliver directly to users as it didn’t provide the level of functionality and ease of use required.
The next step was to build an application that could leverage the captured data and provide it to users in a way that required zero training on their part.
USPI used Squirrel365 to build an application that would not only interact with the cache of data and show surfacing problems, but that would be used to drive action across the business.
The InfoBurst Squirrel application gets the key stats into the business at different levels in an easily consumable fashion. Data can be looked at by market, region and facility and can be drilled down even further. Data is also hidden when it’s not relevant to the individual user’s role.
Stats are included for PPE, staff, ventilators, gowns, gloves, sanitising products, masks and Covid-specific drugs.
The application is a run-away success on many levels:
David Behr (VP of BI & Analytics at USPI/Tenet Health) chats to Donald MacCormick on how USPI delivered an award winning COVID-19 staffing & supplies application in just 3 weeks.
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