The Regenstrief COVID-19 Dashboard tracks hospitalization data from all 92 Indiana counties.
(Regenstrief COVID-19 dashboard )
At Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s press briefing last Friday it was announced that hospitalization information by county was now available.
The 50-year-old Regenstrief Institute is the research group that built an online dashboard that shows the rate of hospitalization in each of Indiana’s 92 counties. This was possible with the help of the Indiana Health Information Exchange which gathers data from the state and the different health care systems.
Dr. Peter Embí is the president and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute and led this project. WFIU’s Matt Rasnic talked with Embí about how this project came together and what it can do to aid the COVID-19 pandemic response.
Dr. Peter Embí.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Matt Rasnic: Can you walk me through what went into putting this dashboard and collecting all this data?
Dr. Peter Embí: We identified that it would be complementary to the work of the state to actually pull together health-related data. Dr. Box (Indiana Health Commissioner Kristina Box) and the group really wanted us to be able to inform them and complement what they have in terms of understanding what happens to people who do get hospitalized who go to the emergency department, who end up in the intensive care unit. And we had been working also on creating these dashboards so that we could share that with our health system partners, the state and others. And collaboratively, we've done that.
I think it's (the Health Information Exchange) the reason why we're one of the first in the country to be able to actually look across what's happening across all of our health environment, and be able to say, here's what's happening to people who get sick enough to, unfortunately, need hospitalization, and then characterize that.
Matt: How do you hope to see this help Hoosiers?
Dr. Embí: I really think one of the things that it'll help us with this is first, helping our officials make good decisions. They've already got vast amounts of information that they're leveraging, and this just complements that so we're able to give them better information to help. The State Department of Health and the National Guard and others make better decisions because they can better understand what's happening in our health systems and complement the other data that they have.
For Hoosiers, I think it also helps us with regard to our health systems who are working hard every day to fight this and take excellent care of Hoosiers to better understand and begin to characterize what's happening in terms of capacity, in terms of what it is we need to do.
Matt: How do you think is the best way to approach dealing with this pandemic moving forward?
Dr. Embí: I think that the approach that we've been taking, driven by the science and being data-driven, is the right approach. We have to, as challenging as this is on so many levels, in terms of health, but also in terms of the challenges to people's lives, to the economy to all the different elements. The last thing we want is to end up in a situation where we yo-yo, where we … open too quickly and we ended up having another outbreak and then having to … close everything up again. So being very deliberate and cautious as we do this is going to be really critical, especially in the coming days and weeks.
Matt: Have any of the numbers helped you learn anything more about the virus itself?
Dr. Embí: I think what we're doing is starting to develop a better understanding of what it is that patients who become infected, what proportion of them actually do end up getting so sick that they need to go to the hospital. I think we are starting to understand as more data come out, not only from across the state but also across the world that we're analyzing, to be able to get a better handle on how different people will respond. We're going to continue to analyze it with that purpose in mind.
Matt: How can this information be used to help prepare us for the possibility of a future outbreak?
Dr. Embí: I think it's quite helpful because … it not only sets the beginnings of some baseline figures where we can understand what the current trajectory is for what happens to people as they become infected, and what proportion of them are going to end up being hospitalized - I think these kinds of data and analyses give us the information we need to be able to spot those outbreaks when they do occur and to be able to better plan and prepare for how we need to respond to them. So it's going to really feed into that future work to be able to have early warning systems and capabilities.
