How St. Luke’s is Tracking COVID-19 Testing Status with BCA Dashboards

At iatricSystems, we recognize the importance of celebrating success and connecting healthcare organizations to resources that might be helpful during this time. When we heard how our friends from St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota were tracking COVID-19 testing status with BCA dashboard, we asked Ken Stigen, Clinical Informaticist from St. Luke’s to share his story. Here is what he had to say about tracking COVID-19.

Hello to iatricSystems readers. I thought I would first start by giving a brief background about our hospital. St. Luke's has provided medical leadership since its founding as Duluth’s first hospital in 1881 and has since stayed true to our renowned patient-centered focus. The goal for St. Luke’s BCA dashboards was to support our leadership team across all departments during an unprecedented situation.

COVID-19 brought on challenges hospitals haven’t had to face before and in such high capacity, too. There are more patients and more data – and we needed a way to make sense of it all.

By using SQL query and Data Repository combined with the BCA functionality of MEDITECH Expanse, we were able to craft visualizations for the leadership team to use.

Each hospital department can look at tables or records and quickly make sense of the numbers. They can also easily rearrange those records to get views that can help them solve challenges and make leadership decisions.

We created three different dashboards using test data to share how we were tracking COVID-19 testing for both patients and staff.

Two of the dashboards cover detection and testing across all locations, and the third is a “visual heat-map” of testing results based on zip codes.

Benefits of BCA Dashboards

• Returns all patients who were tested for COVID-19 using Expanse OM Orders and NPR Lab results
• Updates every 2 hours during the day, every 4 hours at night
• Allows to filter by result, registration status, registration type, testing status, isolation status, location, and day tested
• Gives at-a-glance visibility to patient details which can be changed by the different filters
• Shows test results by percentage
• Indicates average turnaround time of testing
• Exports to an Excel spreadsheet or PDF

We were able to rework a solution that we were already using – MEDITECH Expanse – and reconfigure the BCA dashboards to solve new challenges and give our team a day-to-day data path that has become fundamental in our routine.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Luke’s and how we’re using technology to overcome challenges, you can visit our website or reach out to the iatricSystem’s team, and they’ll connect you with the technology department at St. Luke’s.