Ensuring mental health patient safety during a global pandemic

SAS delivers dashboard to monitor COVID-19 in Copenhagen Regional Psychiatric Centers

As COVID-19 patients were hospitalized around the world in March 2020, Danish health authorities rushed to find solutions that could limit the impact on daily operations for people with chronic illness and emergency needs in Denmark.

At Copenhagen Regional Psychiatric Centers, management needed to find a way to ensure mental health patients’ needs were being met while limiting the risk of contagion for patients and staff, both from within hospitals and from the outside.

The nine psychiatric care centers in the region have 5,000 employees and care for more than 50,000 patients on an annual basis, covering both inpatient and outpatient services for adults and children. The treatment itself takes place in about 100 different physical locations.

SAS’ Nordic Healthcare team helped set up an automated dashboard in SAS Visual Analytics that gives hospital management an overview of the most important data regarding the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the care centers.

Martin Lund, Director of Copenhagen Regional Psychiatric Centers, is responsible for ensuring that all aspects of the pandemic’s impact are weighed in daily decisions. From government policy, medical expertise and logistical considerations to staff needs, he now consults the SAS Visual Analytics COVID-19 dashboard in daily meetings.

Informing decisions on daily operations

The dashboard plays a key role in daily management meetings and gives a status on COVID-19 cases for the centers in total as well as the individual centers. It helps inform decisions about whether it is safe to receive patients at different locations and how high the sick-leave numbers are for staff. All of this information is vital to assess how the pandemic is affecting the centers' ability to provide psychiatric care.

“In a situation where we are constantly having to make decisions that can mean in order to preserve patients’ and staff’s physical well-being we risk compromising patients’ mental health, it is crucial that we have the best information available to us in one easy overview, both on an aggregated and center level,” Lund says.

Jacob Bille Krogh, Head of Scorecards and Patient Logistics at Copenhagen Regional Psychiatric Centers, helped initiate the project with SAS. Initially, his team manually compiled the information. But they turned to SAS to automate the information flow after finding inspiration in the SAS Global COVID-19 Tracker.

“We had a real need to be able to read the trends and see how various factors such as infection patterns and employee absences would affect daily operations,” Krogh says. “Would we have to close units entirely? Would we be able to serve patients who really needed hospitalization for their mental illness, or would we need to ask them to stay at home?”

A short process in a time of urgency

Two weeks after Copenhagen Regional Psychiatric Centers discussed business needs with SAS, the management dashboard was ready.

In the beginning, Krogh’s team manually extracted the most important data from various data sources. The data sets were exported to SAS Viya. Then the process of designing and rendering reports in SAS Visual Analytics could begin. In two weeks – with daily scrum meetings starting at 8 a.m. – tasks were defined in a common visual Kanban board. The tasks were carried out, and progress was demonstrated daily. A close and intense teamwork ensued. The care centers’ team delivered requirements, data extracts and feedback, while SAS delivered expertise in analytics, visual design and process management.

By using functionality in the SAS Grid environment for data manipulation and automation, the whole process was automated from source data, trough validation and transformation to the final daily updated COVID-19 dashboard to management.

“The dashboard helps inform and weigh some difficult decisions at a difficult time,” Krogh concludes.