Tallahassee (Fla.) Memorial HealthCare recently launched a COVID-19 dashboard centered on tracking COVID-19 inpatients at the hospital.
Here, Stephanie Derzypolski, TMH's vice president and chief communications officer, discusses the dashboard's conception and implementation.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: When did TMH realize the need for a COVID-19 dashboard?
Stephanie Derzypolski: Here at TMH, we have an internal dashboard to keep all of our colleagues informed about the number of COVID-19 inpatients and the total number treated to date by our organization. We received positive feedback about how effective it was in quickly communicating these important statistics. Last week, we started seeing an increase in our COVID-19 inpatients as well as more COVID-19 cases overall throughout our North Florida and South Georgia region. Our medical experts have worked hard to educate our community to monitor the hospitalization rate of infected people, not just the total number of positive cases. In order to follow hospitalization rate, you need to understand how many people are currently hospitalized, so we decided to make our dashboard information available to the public.
Q: What did implementation of the COVID-19 dashboard look like and who was involved?
SD: Implementing the dashboard was a collaboration between our infection prevention, clinical and communications teams to develop a consistent report and schedule to keep our community informed.
Q: How is the COVID-19 dashboard updated? What does that process look like?
SD: The dashboard is updated Monday through Friday in the morning. This is a manual process done by the communications team, and the data is received from our infection prevention team.
Q: What does TMH hope people get out of the COVID-19 dashboard?
SD: Our goal is to keep our community informed because knowledge is power. Our dashboard does more than track the current number of COVID-19 inpatients at TMH. It also allows us to educate our community about the many safety measures we have in place and how they can help to reduce the spread of this virus.
Q: Why does TMH think it's important to provide the community with transparent and accurate information?
SD: Although TMH is the largest private employer in Tallahassee, we are also a group of 5,500+ men and women looking to do what is best for our community. Being clear, direct and honest during a global pandemic is something every hospital should do. Everyone has a role to play to limit the spread of this virus and we are trying our best to do our part by providing care and information to our neighbors.