Operations (management) warp speed: Rapid deployment of hospital‐focused predictive/prescriptive analytics for the COVID‐19 pandemic
针对医院在疫情中缺乏可操作分析工具的困境，开发了一个多方法框架，通过简约设计快速部署预测和处方分析，预测患者工作量和关键资源需求，为医院战术和运营决策提供支持。
At the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, hospitals were in dire need of data‐driven analytics to provide support for critical, expensive, and complex decisions. Yet, the majority of analytics being developed were targeted at state‐ and national‐level policy decisions, with little availability of actionable information to support tactical and operational decision‐making and execution at the hospital level. To fill this gap, we developed a multi‐method framework leveraging a parsimonious design philosophy that allows for rapid deployment of high‐impact predictive and prescriptive analytics in a time‐sensitive, dynamic, data‐limited environment, such as a novel pandemic. The product of this research is a workload prediction and decision support tool to provide mission‐critical, actionable information for individual hospitals. Our framework forecasts time‐varying patient workload and demand for critical resources by integrating disease progression models, tailored to data availability during different stages of the pandemic, with a stochastic network model of patient movements among units within individual hospitals. Both components employ adaptive tuning to account for hospital‐dependent, time‐varying parameters that provide consistently accurate predictions by dynamically learning the impact of latent changes in system dynamics. Our decision support system is designed to be portable and easily implementable across hospital data systems for expeditious expansion and deployment. This work was contextually grounded in close collaboration with IU Health, the largest health system in Indiana, which has 18 hospitals serving over one million residents. Our initial prototype was implemented in April 2020 and has supported managerial decisions, from the operational to the strategic, across multiple functionalities at IU Health.