By Kristen Godfrey. The vaccination effort is a national emergency. UC Davis Health needed to manage its response in a data-driven way to ensure that we identified and targeted our efforts to those most vulnerable to contracting COVID-19.
To achieve this goal, clinical decision makers needed up-to-date and reliable information, and they needed it fast. In other words, they needed a single COVID vaccination dashboard. Under the leadership of Dr. Ashish Atreja, CIO and chief digital health officer now leading the Innovation Technology department, the Unified Reporting Collaborative (URC) was designed to enable reporting collaboration across the health system.
Creation of the URC provided a forum for various teams to leverage their expertise, reduce redundancy of effort, and produce accurate, actionable information quickly. The URC is composed of key personnel from multiple health system reporting groups, including Ambulatory Analytics, Operational Analytics, the IT Data Provisioning Core, the IT Systems Interface Team, Employee Health Services, Department of Pharmacy Services, and Patient Care Services.
Jason Adams, M.D., director of Digital Health Innovation, led the day-to-day efforts of the URC. “It made me proud to say I work at UC Davis Health. This team’s skills, work ethic, and collegiality were truly world class,” said Adams. “You can always show data but actually making sure it’s the right data and that you don’t lose trust in it over time is critical.”
The team rapidly mobilized and met frequently, often daily, to work through the various requests made for information related to the vaccination campaign. They responded to the needs for a consolidated dashboard to be used by the COVID Command Center leadership group, operational reports used for targeted patient outreach, and external reports indicating the number of vaccinations administered by UCDH.
Once a direction was clear, the URC brought to bear informatics expertise to acquire, curate, and centralize disparate data sources into a single source of truth that contained the necessary information to make the best decisions to meet vaccinations needs in the region.
Many people worked long hours, nights, and weekends to ensure the URC kept pace with the evolving eligibility requirements provided by the California Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control. This incredible team effort at UC Davis Health resulted in the development of a state-of-the-art operational dashboard.
The COVID-19 vaccination dashboard is now live and widely used across UCDH. The dashboard is organized into four content areas: vaccine supply, vaccination appointment scheduling, vaccination administration, and the demographics of those vaccinated. This information is proving invaluable by ensuring that we are vaccinating the right people at the right time and providing necessary protection to the most vulnerable populations.
“The amount of teamwork and coordination has been above what I’ve experienced at any other company. While no data can ever be perfect, the data quality and functionality that the URC produced is the best I have ever seen,” said Chris Hilscher, program manager, Innovation Technology.
See the image of the dashboard below.
Kristen Godfrey is a communication specialist, Information Technology, UC Davis Health.