Lectus: Hospital needs in epidemics
Web application for estimating acute hospital beds needs to face epidemics or acute disease outbreaks, including intermediate and critical care hospital beds. It’s uses local hospital beds data to inform health managers about the dates of possible congestion and the number of additional beds require to avoid them.
Francisco Carlos Cardoso de Campos, principal researcher at Nescon and team coordinator.
- Recover (Improve health & economic system resilience), such as: Best protective interventions, especially for vulnerable populations, Avoid/mitigate negative second-order consequences, Integrate true costs of pandemic risk into economic systems
The problem is estimating hospital beds demand to face a pandemic. The proposed solution is a web application to predict the hospital resources required to support the decisions of healthcare managers (ordinary beds and intensive care beds - ICU) in advance for usual hospital care, supporting planning coping actions. The application brings together three components: (i) the first one consists of a predictive model of the course of the epidemic, based on the daily adjustment of a differential logistic curve using data from notified cases in previous days; (ii) a second component models the dynamics of patients' use of hospital beds; (iii) a third component incorporates an epidemiological SEIRS model to project the epidemics based on refined epidemiological parameters, including the simulation of different scenarios related to social distance rates. The tool applies to regions that have a hospital infrastructure with ICU beds, such as municipalities, specific health regions, or states. The tool provides a solution for local planning, which can be applied in any health region, which can impact the lives of millions of people if we consider that 1% to 3% of those infected patients decease.
The target audience is managers at the local, regional, or state level of the health system, as well as hospital managers interested in sizing the required resources to meet the demand for hospital beds for the care of patients affected by the epidemic process. Health managers are not sure about the timing of hospital shortages due to their occupations by infected patients. We provide support by informing the anticipated use of hospital beds in advance, with the case records provided.
- Growth: An initiative, venture, or organisation with an established product, service, or business/policy model rolled out in one or, ideally, several contexts or communities, which is poised for further growth
- Big Data
- GIS and Geospatial Technology
- Software and Mobile Applications
The "public good" that the solution provides is knowledge in advance, in the form of estimates of the need for hospital beds for the care of critically ill patients affected by COVID-19, accessible from a computerized system of free access via the Internet for all interested parties. The accumulated knowledge was made available in print and digital media, at:
And in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, at:
http://dx.doi.org.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/10.1590/1516...
The open source model is available at:
https://github.com/joaoflaviou...
The free use panel is available at:
On 04/13/202 Brazil presented more than 350,000 deaths from Covid-19. Many of these deaths were due to the absence of ICU beds since hospitals in different health regions reported the full occupancy of the ICU beds on different occasions. The expected positive impact on the target population is expressed by the adequate supply of intermediate and critical beds for hospital care for patients infected with COVID-19 who present complications that justify their hospitalization (respiratory failure, thrombosis, etc.) The web tool allowed mass notification to the population, through digital and print media, of the possibility of saturation of the hospital bed system months in advance, in April 2020.
Although the technology developed is in the growth stage, it needs to be restructured to be scalable, and flexible, to be used globally. The system needs to have a data entry through a template, to be downloaded and filled out by the health manager. The template must be designed following the best practices and include generic, standardized, and easily filled information by any user. The system must have the ability to manage users and databases from different regions of the planet. The application must include the automatic generation of maps according to the user's location, as well as the translation of the web system into several languages. The outputs of reports and graphs must be standardized to facilitate their understanding by different audiences. Thus, the impact of the application would be staggered by its adoption by other health regions in other countries with internet access. Robust technological resources, such as servers and the internet, are also needed.
The impact targets can be assessed by the number of registered users who use the tool in the different health regions of the world. Among the easily quantifiable indicators, we point: (i) the number of users, (ii) the number of forms downloaded, (iii) the number of forms uploaded, filled with epidemic cases for periods (iv) the number of contacts of health managers from different regions with the team. Currently, we have already monitored the number of users registered on the site to use the tool, which totals 5.935 users, but the complementary indicators depend on future developments.
- Brazil
- Angola
- Brazil
- Cabo Verde
- Canada
- Mozambique
- Portugal
- United Kingdom
- United States
We present the financial and technical challenges. Financial challenges: The R$ 240,000 (two hundred thousand reals) funds obtained in August 2020 will be exhausted this April, interrupting the project's financing. Technical challenges: the project has addressed the behavior of the COVID-19 pandemic designed only for Brazilian states and municipalities; therefore, it is not flexible and robust to represent any health region. Moreover, this project cannot be limited to this pandemic, as new epidemics may arise in different contexts. However, the course of epidemics follows a pattern that can be represented with epidemiological curves whose parameters must be adjusted to each reality. Thus, the tool must be improved and incorporate flexibility characteristics capable of adapting to different health regions. The proposal includes the evolution of this project for the next 3 years and the necessary resources for its execution and its maintenance.
- Academic or Research Institution
- Núcleo de Educação em Saúde Coletiva (NESCON), da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG);
- Departamento de Engenharia de Produção, Escola de Engenharia da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG);
- Rede Brasileira de Cooperação em Emergências: (RBCE)
There is interest in establishing partnerships with research and development institutions to expand the scope and improve the application, especially its adaptation to other epidemics, a configuration of the system for data entry in other data structures used by other countries, expansion of types of hospital resources provided by the model. In the last 5 years, spending on scientific research in the country fell from R$ 13,97 billion to R$ 5 billion. We cannot, however, hide the fact that the enrollment in the Trinity Challenge represents the possibility of providing resources for the continuity of the financing of the development of the application, as the funding sources for Research & Development in Brazil were extremely reduced government that is opposed to science and the academic community.
The team intends to expand the partnership in process with the
Representation of the State Secretaries of Health National Council of
Secretaries of Health - CONASS, and the Representation of the Municipal
Secretaries of Health National Council of Municipal Secretaries of
Health - CONASEMS.
Adjunct Professor