Mapping COVID-19 Spread with Interactive Dashboards

It can be difficult to find accurate and timely information on providers and population health during a viral outbreak. As we find ourselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Definitive Healthcare is seeking to ease the problem of data access. Today, we announced a partnership with Esri, the world’s largest location intelligence company, to deliver an interactive mapped data service tracking hospital bed capacity across the U.S.

In combining Esri’s geospatial cloud with our industry intelligence, we’re enabling decision-makers to track hospital bed utilization rates during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. The dashboard and interactive maps are overlaid with U.S. Census data, which enables researchers, public health officials, and the general public to monitor potential risk areas by geography.

The map below and others can be found on Esri’s COVID-19 GIS Hub, a web-based tool for gathering and sharing global population health intelligence on the spread and mitigation of COVID-19. Other than the Hospital Beds Dashboard, the Esri site also includes interactive dashboards on global COVID-19 cases; a COVID-19 surveillance dashboard; GIS apps that illustrate regional data in China, Italy, Japan, and Hong Kong; and a story map that examines age and social vulnerability.

Hospital Beds Dashboard on Esri’s COVID-19 GIS Hub

Fig 1 This interactive map features data on hospital beds, including licensed beds, staffed beds, average bed utilization rate, and potential increase in bed capacity. Data last updated on March 15, 2020.

Definitive Healthcare is providing hospital bed count data  in order to enable observation of the care capacity of hospitals across the country as cases of COVID-19 proliferate. In this way, care providers and public health officials can determine where and at which hospitals additional bed capacity could be accommodated.

In this case, a staffed bed is defined as an “adult or pediatric bed, birthing room, or newborn ICU bed (excluding newborn bassinets) maintained in a patient care area for lodging patients in acute, long term, or domiciliary areas of the hospital.” Not included in this count are beds in labor or birthing rooms, post-anesthesia and postoperative recovery rooms, outpatient areas, emergency rooms, ancillary departments, nurses and other staff residences, and other areas which are utilized for only a portion of the patient stay.

Additionally, to ensure our dashboard is as comprehensive as possible, we’ve included the following facility types as “hospitals”:

• Short-term acute care hospital (STAC)
• Critical access hospital (CAH)
• Religious non-medical health care institutions
• Long-term acute care hospitals
• Rehabilitation hospitals
• Childrens’ hospitals
• Psychiatric hospitals
• Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals
• Department of Defense (DoD) hospitals

To learn more about the data we pulled for this report, please read our data explanation.

Ensuring the distribution of accurate, helpful information during a time of widespread public anxiety may be challenging—which is why Definitive Healthcare is fully committed to supporting Esri’s development of these specialized dashboards. By combining data and analytics from a variety of sources, these time-enabled maps can help reveal how COVID-19 is spread over time, and where care providers and public health officials may prioritize interventions.

Learn more

For more information on how to leverage interactive visual dashboard to glean insights on patient cohorts and population health, visit the Definitive Healthcare blog. For analyzing patient journeys and provider affiliations, we recommend Tracing Referral Patterns with DHC Visuals. If you’d prefer more information on leveraging diagnosis and procedure data, try Interpreting Medical Claims Data With Visual Analytics.