NMC Health

Uncovers COVID-19 Insights With MEDITECH’s BCA Solution

When COVID-19 struck, leadership at NMC Health knew it was imperative that staff have timely access to the data they need to make the best, most informed decisions, whether related to bed occupancy, testing, or PPE. To do so, they turned to MEDITECH’s Business and Clinical Analytics solution.

Dashboards in BCA provide staff with a single source of truth for critical information while also eliminating time-consuming manual data collection. By leveraging BCA and working alongside MEDITECH, NMC Health created COVID-19 dashboards to uncover insights needed to care for its patients during the pandemic.

“We used MEDITECH’s Professional Services for a project in the past and they were very responsive and great to work with,” said Kelly Lippold, director of Clinical Informatics. “We wanted to track patients in-house who had been tested and run occupancy stats from certain locations, but our Professional Services analyst brought more ideas to the table and expanded what we would be able to look at.”

MEDITECH assisted the hospital’s Incident Command team with evaluating, designing, and testing BCA dashboards, and creating reports to achieve their organizational goals. NMC Health’s daily operational huddles are conducted based on data from three key dashboards: Snapshot, Lab Tests, and Supply Tracking.

Snapshot:
Provides a real-time view of in-house patients, which locations they’re in, their testing status, and the number of patients on ventilators. Management also uses this dashboard to filter out key areas of concern, such as monitoring the hospital’s occupancy rate to prepare for potential step-down overflow units. A “test pending” special indicator monitors patients across care settings; if patients are tested and diagnosed in an outpatient setting and later return to the inpatient setting with more serious symptoms, the indicator is still present.

Lab Tests:
Allows staff to monitor all lab tests by date range and zip code (for possible disease clusters). They can also track the volume of testing to prevent overtesting if supplies are short. Turnaround times for tests sent to state and reference labs are also tracked so the hospital can follow up on any delays.

Supply Tracking:
Pulls supply reports into BCA through integration with MEDITECH’s Materials Management and uses this data to monitor items in high demand. The Materials Management director reviews the average quantity used by day to determine the item’s “burn rate.” The result is compared to trends over time to calculate the “days left on hand” for that item, based on CDC recommendations, which is submitted to the state to justify supply purchases.

“Capturing supplies through BCA has simplified the life of our Materials Management director. She can focus on what we need versus spending time figuring out what we already have,” said Lippold.