One of the most insidious characteristics of the global COVID-19 outbreak is the extreme pressure it places on hospitals and health professionals. The exponential growth in case numbers means the number of people with severe symptoms may quickly exceed the available healthcare capacity.
Accordingly, lockdown measures being enacted by governments around the world seek to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 cases to enable the health systems to provide appropriate care to those who need it most.
Data analytics are also helping health authorities prepare for local outbreaks and make rapid decisions in uncertain conditions.
Several health districts in Australia subscribe to GHD Advisory’s Edge platform, a digital client delivery portal that hosts datasets and insights from our teams.
With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, our team mobilised to generate analyses to help these health authorities rapidly identify and prioritise locations that are likely to require extra respiratory clinic resources.
The analyses combine existing datasets hosted on Edge, such as population and demographic information, with travel time and existing healthcare facility data to generate heatmaps of high-risk areas that are likely to face high numbers of patients with severe respiratory symptoms.
Data insights are being generated to ensure that critical decisions on what resources are deployed work to enhance community health outcomes. Further analysis and new datasets are currently being added to meet evolving needs of our clients as the crisis unfolds.
While COVID-19 is the most urgent challenge facing health systems around the world, data-driven decision-making capabilities will increasingly transform all facets of healthcare, helping provide surge capacity, improve quality of care, optimise operations and enhance resilience.
GHD will be issuing a series of think pieces aimed at exploring how our industries will be adjusting to this new normal, how digitisation and “everything online” will come to life, and how businesses can adapt to new forms of continuity risks today and in the future. To access these insights, click here.
Jamie Blair leads GHD Advisory’s data and analytics team, which includes providing bespoke tools for investment analysis, capital portfolio optimisation and allocation and simulation. He has more than 20 years of consulting experience, predominantly in infrastructure advisory services, with a specific focus on benchmarking, efficiency analysis and engineering analysis.
