CalvertHealth Medical Center

Monitors Coronavirus Cases Using MEDITECH’s BCA Solution

To stay ahead of the coronavirus pandemic, the Maryland Department of Health mandated on March 3, 2020, that all healthcare organizations report to the state on any patients who present with symptoms of COVID-19. CalvertHealth’s infection control department looked to their business application specialist and MEDITECH’s Business and Clinical Analytics solution to meet the daunting challenge of pulling together the necessary data within 24 hours. The team was already using BCA for its reporting features and was able to leverage datasets they had previously created to quickly build a coronavirus monitoring dashboard and meet the next-day reporting deadline.

CalvertHealth’s COVID-19 monitoring dashboard

The dashboard groups patients with COVID-19 symptoms into two types: influenza-like illness and acute respiratory illness. ILI patients have a fever over 100 degrees and a cough or sore throat. ARI patients have at least two symptoms that include cough, fever/chills, rhinorrhea/nasal congestion, shortness of breath/respiratory distress, or sore throat. Based on the number of symptoms present, patients are categorized as having either an ILI, an ARI, or both. CalvertHealth must report to the state health department any patient who presents with both or just one of those illnesses.

An infection control practitioner at CalvertHealth exports the patient/result data from the BCA dashboard and forwards that information to the Maryland Department of Health each day. Pulling the data directly from an interactive BCA dashboard saves time. But it also improves communication by enabling them to share information within CalvertHealth and to report it directly to the state. 

CalvertHealth’s hospital occupancy dashboard

Days later, CalvertHealth was tasked with developing a second BCA dashboard to address a new requirement from the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services System — which also came with a one-day turnaround time. This request focused on reporting hospital bed availability in acute, pediatric, and ICU settings, as well as overall occupancy. The information must be submitted by 8 a.m. daily, and helps state officials move patients to hospitals and clinics that can best accommodate them, in the event of capacity issues.

Using previously built dashboards and datasets, CalvertHealth’s analyst created this dashboard in an hour and captured nearly all mandatory fields, with the remaining fields easily extracted from MEDITECH’s EHR.

Meeting the tight reporting deadlines set by government agencies during the pandemic is a challenge. Lisa Carlson, an application specialist at CalvertHealth, said, “We get these notifications on a Tuesday and need to report by Wednesday. We have to be extremely flexible and responsive to these requests. This gets the job done for us.”