Peter Schorsch
Tampa General Hospital announced today a unique, collaborative data sharing program among 51 Florida hospitals to fight COVID-19.
The data sharing agreement will help patients during diagnosis, treatment and recovery from novel coronavirus.
TGH is partnering with SME Solutions Group and other hospitals in Tampa Bay and Southwest Florida to share data across systems. This allows health care systems that typically compete for market share to join forces and battle the COVID-19 pandemic together.
“Tampa General Hospital has a vision to become the safest and most innovative academic healthcare system in the country. We look for partners that can help us be creative in ways we’ve never thought imaginable. This data is helping us join forces as healthcare leaders and systems to fight this global pandemic affecting our entire world,” TGH President and CEO John Couris said. “It’s a great use of technology, but even more than that, it’s a powerful tool of collaboration to benefit our community.”
Through this partnership, interactive dashboards have been developed to aggregate data among 51 hospitals. The dashboard, called the COVID-19 Florida West Coast Regional Data Exchange, is giving health care leaders a bird’s eye view with real-time data, so clinical teams in multiple locations can make the best decisions to help patients find care at the right time and in the right place.
The dashboard shows the number of patients with COVID-19 and those without COVID-19, as well as which hospitals have the capacity to take in additional patients. The dashboard also reflects critical information that includes highlighting the resources available at each hospital such as the number of available negative-pressure rooms, ICU rooms and ventilator counts.
This is not only helpful for hospital leaders, but also for emergency managers and state health officials who can make better decisions with a wide overview of how the region is responding to the pandemic. Among other metrics, the COVID-19 Regional Data Exchange:
— Tracks the number of “patients under investigation,” who may have COVID-19 but are awaiting test results.
— Tracks the number of available negative-pressure hospital rooms, ICU beds and ventilators.
— Incorporates a forecasting model developed by IBM to anticipate COVID-19 patients in the ICU.
SME worked closely with Tampa General and partnered with Qlik to donate and deploy Qlik Sense Enterprise software as part of the project. One of SME’s key roles in this project was to rapidly deploy a cloud environment allowing approved users to access the data while maintaining privacy and security protocols.
“Today more than ever, data integrity and data trust are of the utmost importance to ensure proper communication and to improve the speed of decision making. At a time when the balance between speed and accuracy is crucial, making critical data readily available, accessible, and reliable to these hospitals is a must,” said Chris Moyer, President & CEO of SME.
The result is a powerful partnership between TGH, AdventHealth, BayCare Health System, HCA Healthcare, Lakeland Regional Health, Lee Health and Manatee Memorial Hospital.
Also on Thursday, Tampa General Hospital announced it plans to resume elective surgeries on May 4, with strict safety guidelines implemented.
One comment
Ward Posey
May 1, 2020 at 9:47 am
Many of us get some of our health care at the VA at Bay Pines. Why not add them to this network?
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