Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has created Covid-19 forecasting system that applies research methods to study healthcare delivery questions, according to the Harvard Business Review website.
This forecasting may be a new opportunity in healthcare operations that can be useful in times of extreme uncertainty.
National forecasting models broke down when predicting hospital capacity for Covid-19 patients because no local variables were included. The most widely used national model applied methods on earlier Covid-19 data from other countries to predict future developments in the United States.
National models did not consider local hospital decision-making or local-level socioeconomic factors which dramatically impact key variables like population density, pre-existing health status, and reliance on public transportation.