Alberta has “flattened” the COVID-19 curve, carefully managing the impact of the pandemic on Alberta’s health system by using real-time data and evidence to inform decisions. The Alberta SPOR SUPPORT Unit (AbSPORU) is working with the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC) to undertake outbreak modelling, case reporting, and capacity planning, all being used to help coordinate health service operations and optimal patient care options. Jeff Bakal, Program Director, Provincial Research Data Services, discusses how the support provided by the AbSPORU Data Platform has helped the province manage its impressive response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The AbSPORU Data Platform has developed and evaluated models to help AHS ECC understand the risk to patients that the COVID-19 pandemic represents, and how best to transition those patients affected through the Emergency Department, Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and in-patient settings. The AbSPORU Data Platform has also developed early stage decision support tools to inform AHS’ admission process for patients testing positive for COVID-19 as well as ICU management optimization using Alberta data.
The AbSPORU Data Platform was able to rapidly respond to the health system’s needs with near real-time solutions by leveraging the Platform’s existing data assets, analytic expertise and digital systems. Patients are quickly enrolled in cutting edge clinical trials and studies on treatment and understanding of the disease.
Our AbSPORU research data scientists were able to quickly learn and adapt to the new and near real-time data sources that were brought online as part of the pandemic response (e.g., COVID-19 test results). Further, they were able to evaluate models and methods from other provinces jurisdictions to understand what was learned and could be applied to the Alberta population context.
