SAP Digital Boardroom helps Parkland Health manage pandemic Posted on : Sep 25 - 2020

Parkland Health managed a surge of cases caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by using data analytics based on SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom.

Data analytics based on SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom played a significant role in helping a major hospital system prepare for and manage a surge of activity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas has a progressive strategy for analytics, given its status as both a safety net hospital for Dallas county and a designated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regional site. But the surge of COVID-19 cases enabled the hospital to put some underused analytics investments to good use.

The technology approach to managing COVID-19 cases centered around SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Digital Boardroom. SAP Analytics Cloud is a business intelligence (BI) platform on SAP HANA that enables companies to manage and make use of data flowing in from a variety of sources. SAP Digital Boardroom is a data visualization application that presents data from SAP Analytics Cloud in customizable dashboards.

Parkland Health built an executive command center using SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom to provide the health system's staff with critical information, said Scott Harrison, Parkland Health's chief data officer.

In the past year, Parkland's data science team had been using SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom to deliver useful analytics to clinical staff, operations and business groups, but adoption was low, Harrison said.

And then COVID-19 hit and everything changed.

COVID-19 changes everything

"[We wanted] the ability to promote a product within the hospital without really shoving it down their throats," Harrison said. "We started getting more visibility and then -- lo and behold -- February hits, we start hearing the rumblings of COVID, and then in March all of the sudden we [need to] have a command center."

The push to quickly build a command center was a proactive measure based on Parkland Health's designation as a safety net hospital, which means it legally has to provide care for patients regardless of their ability to pay. And its status as a FEMA regional site required the health system to monitor and report data such as admitted patients and available bed space to the agency, as well as to hospital management and its board of directors.

Beginning March 13, the data science team began to create the SAP Digital Boardroom dashboards that could feed data to the command center during the pandemic, and the initial drafts were available within a couple days, according to Harrison. View More