As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, more health analytics providers are mobilizing data assets to support public health officials in the race to track, monitor, and respond to the spreading disease. With the help of its cloud-based, high-value care platform, hc1, a leading provider of healthcare analytics solutions, is helping public health officials stay ahead of the coronavirus outbreak by turning previously static lab data into actionable healthcare insights. 

As the largest private-sector, lab-agnostic data integrator, hc1 has the largest repository of live, normalized lab orders and results in the U.S., including data on 160 million unique individuals with over 19 billion clinical transaction results. Having already used its platform to surface insights into public health crises such as the opioid epidemic, the team at hc1 quickly realized the value of its aggregated clinical and laboratory diagnostic data in the context of the current pandemic.  

The hc1 platform has the power to ingest and organize data from all U.S. laboratories, a unique capability unmatched by similar platforms. Using Snowflake Cloud Data Platform as the central processing engine that underpins its platform, hc1 developed a COVID-19 lab testing dashboard within days. The dashboard provides real-time visibility for public health officials seeking to track COVID-19 testing and infection rates and monitor hospital capacities in their regions.

Instead of surveillance data views such as those provided by Johns Hopkins University in its visualizations and mapping of COVID-19 data from the CDC, the hc1 dashboard offers fresher, more granular data through live feeds. Within hours of reporting, public health officials have ready access to timely and actionable insights they need to plan and deploy health resources. 

Displayed as a heat map, the dashboard offers near real-time visualizations of the volume and location of COVID-19 patient testing. Public health officials can drill down into and analyze data at the country, state, county and neighborhood (Public Use Microdata Area) level. The dashboard is also populated by aggregated and de-identified COVID-19 testing data that reflects community level testing activity; positivity rate changes over time; and the numbers of negative, positive, and inconclusive tests—all of which is otherwise unavailable for public health use. 

“Delivering quick and detailed results is absolutely critical in a situation like this,” hc1’s VP of Architecture, Mark Preston, explained. “Public health officials are starved for timely, accurate, and actionable information. Using Snowflake, the hc1 dashboard is able to deliver on all those fronts.” 

As public health institutions are forced to mature their response to pandemics such as COVID-19, timely and granular insights delivered by dashboards similar to hc1’s will become even more mission critical. The rapid deployment of analytics will continue to offer promise as it shapes the preventative measures taken by communities, health systems, public health institutions, and government agencies that seek to monitor and manage the spread of infectious disease.

Learn more about epidemiological data on the incidence and mortality of COVID-19 cases as reported by public health authorities worldwide.