New system for monitoring bed and device capacities
The COVID-19 pandemic is challenge not only for doctors, healthcare professionals or scientists, but also for their technical and IT support. For example, the Ministry of Health has prepared a web application for monitoring inpatient and facility capacity so that each hospital can supply and regularly update its data. Based on this data, the coordinator at the regional level was able to organize the placement of patients with COVID-19 disease.
However, the existing FNUSA information systems do not allow the required data to be easily identified due to the number of departments. In a situation where there was a danger that it would be difficult to secure data every day by phone or e-mail, two researchers from the Biostatistics team of the International Clinical Research Center of St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno (FNUSA-ICRC) MUDr. BSc Michal Šitina Ph.D. and Jan Voříšek came with solution.
“Given that the interventions in the existing hospiral information system would be very complicated, we decided to solve it using the web application REDCap, which is already commonly used in FNUSA-ICRC,” said Jan Voříšek. Within a fortnight, a new system was created that allows all required data to be monitored online.
“Under normal circumstances, it would not be necessary to monitor so much data at the same time, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic, this has changed from day to day. However, the situation is gradually calming down, for example, we are now sending data to the Ministry of Health only once a week, “said Michal Šitina. “We were ready to offer this system to other hospitals as well, but fortunately the pandemic did not break out with such force that they could not handle it on their own.”
Although there are hours of work behind this system, both creators hope that it will no longer have to be reused. “With the return to the normal state, it will no longer be necessary to have such complex data, so we will continue on the existing hospital systems,” added Michal Šitina.
