The purpose of this dashboard is to discover new insights with regards to the coronavirus’s impact in nursing homes. The group that has taken on this project is composed of individuals with a variety of specialities such as information systems, health care management, prior experience in nursing home administration, public health and health disparities, health care industry processes, emerging technologies, social inclusion, at-risk populations and health outcomes. Their research at present focuses on highlighting the different nursing home characteristics that further the spread of COVID-19 and external factors such as socioeconomics, demographics, and region.
This COVID-19 impact analysis will investigate the effects of the virus in nursing homes across the United States and how aspects such as demographics, staffing, supplies, etc. contribute towards its spread. As the virus continues to spread and mutate to the point of evading some of the current vaccines on the market, it is crucial for the development of products that will allow nursing home officials and staff to have the ability to make smarter decisions which will reduce the spread of the virus in the work environment. These products can also potentially save the lives of nursing home residents and staff as well as encourage the creation of new policies that alleviate other issues that arise on part of the coronavirus. The products will be presented in the form of dashboards which give the nursing home stakeholders such as CMS officials, nursing home administrators and staff the ability to visualize and observe the magnitude of the role of coronavirus in specific nursing homes, zip codes, states and counties.
The purpose of the project is to develop a dashboard to answer questions developed by the research team in hopes of furthering understanding of the COVID-19 situation within nursing homes and allowing stakeholders to make informed decisions which can but is not limited to reducing the spread of the coronavirus. The viability of the dashboard will depend on the attributes possessed such as the type of information conveyed, the level of detail, and reusability potential. Stakeholders can use the dashboard to guide decision making and improve processes. Identifying shifts in coronavirus cases over time and the factors contributing to those shifts can provide opportunities to improve best practices and policies.
There are two sources of data that are being interacted with for the purposes of this project. The first source is the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which provides a large dataset corresponding to over 15,000 nursing homes that are mandated to report COVID-19 information. This is the dataset that contains COVID-19 data for nursing homes specifically. CMS maintains data on the quality of care provided by nursing homes which is updated quarterly. Types of data include quality ratings, health and fire safety inspections, penalties and fines, and staffing through the payroll based journal. Quality information include quality ratings, health/fire inspection ratings, etc. Second are the data from USAFacts which contains daily cases/deaths information by US county as well as population info. For further information about the data from these sources, please consider clicking on the links below to view their websites.
For all of the visualizations below, we use data starting from May 30, 2020 to June 19, 2022.
This visualization is meant to show resident issues in nursing homes including weekly admissions, cases, and deaths. It also shows county information including population, cases and deaths for comparison.
This visualization is meant to show vaccination rates in nursing homes split by residences and staff.