Keep Patients Safe with Tableau

Jess Minton
Slalom Technology
Published in
3 min readApr 22, 2020

Here in New York City, our Slalom office is empty, and the streets are mostly quiet. But every night at 7 pm, we join thousands of our neighbors cheering out of windows and from rooftops in solidarity with our healthcare and essential workers, who face a daunting challenge: New York is currently the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health crisis unmatched in transmissibility and mortality since the 1918 Spanish Influenza.

Our Slalom teams are deeply invested in our communities. Right now, that means helping our local healthcare workers and hospitals leverage their resources effectively. By keeping hospital leadership informed, staff, equipment, and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) can be distributed to make the most of scarce supplies in a time of exponential demand.

With overburdened hospitals struggling to respond, healthcare executives need to understand their capacity, support their workers, and help them operate in these truly unprecedented times. Working with healthcare providers and health-system researchers on the front lines, Slalom created an intuitive and accessible display of relevant hospital resources, like hospital beds and nurses. This will assist those working during the COVID-19 crisis in effectively triaging equipment and staff, allowing for more efficient allocation of resources.

Called coSAFE, these dashboards are built in Tableau and provide important insights:

Download Slalom’s coSAFE dashboard template for Tableau.
  • System Snapshot — This provides a hospital-level summary and a quick look at COVID-19 positive patients, COVID-19 patients under investigation, and available resources (e.g. nurse staffing, PPE, ventilators).
  • Unit Snapshot — For a more granular approach, this provides a unit level view highlighting needed RNs, available RNs, variance, and unassigned RNs.

You can manage your hospital system’s resources with this template. Download the workbook here and connect to your data: https://public.tableau.com/profile/slalom5644#!/vizhome/SlalomcoSAFE/UnitView

The dashboard displays data from the hospital level down to distinct units, such as the Intensive Care Unit, or specific COVID units. This approach allows for multi-level comparisons, giving hospital leadership the ability to swiftly make informed decisions on how to redistribute resources efficiently within their system. For large hospital systems, the template could be expanded to track the uses of resources over time, or to view comparisons between various units. It can be easily adapted for different contexts and systems, enabling hospitals to rapidly assess, diagnose and act for the COVID-19 response. For example, a similar dashboard could be deployed in Salesforce, or the Tableau version could be embedded so the right people get information within a system that they already use.

This is not the time to panic; this is the time for us to pull together, partner, and plan for the now and what’s next. New York is currently the center of this pandemic, but the epicenter will shift. The resources we’ve built can be adapted for use across other cities as new hotspots emerge, and we hope they will lessen impacts across the country and the globe.

Want to discuss ways that Slalom can support your organization in leveraging the coSAFE dashboard? Connect with a member of our team to discuss your immediate and top priority needs.

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Jess Minton
Slalom Technology

Data storyteller and analytics advocate with Slalom Consulting, NYC.