Cases2Beds: A Case Study in Actionable Intelligence
In our partnership with the Allegheny County Health Department, we explored avariety of solutions to different pressing challenges during the pandemic. Cases2Beds was one such tool that came as a result of rising COVID cases in Allegheny County.
The goal of Cases2Beds is to project likely hospital bed utilization from any given set of lab-confirmed cases. The intuition of Cases2Beds is that some fraction ((hospitalization rate) of individuals who test positive today will be hospitalized after a time delay (from test date to admit date) and for a varying duration (from admit date to discharge date). These values and distributions vary by individual traits (primarily age group, and then race or gender). Using the current relevant hospitalization rates, delay distributions, and duration distributions, we show what bed usage might be for the inputted positive cases. We are not aware of other generative approaches for hospital utilization.