Last weekend, over a 48-hour period, participants from LeanIX joined thousands of others in responding to a challenge issued by the German government to create digital solutions to combat COVID-19.
Hailed as the largest “hackathon” in history, the initiative resulted in 1,500+ ideas to curb the virus’s spread — all of which are now in the process of being reviewed for immediate use, said Helge Braun, head of the campaign and a member of Germany’s parliament.
An overview of each proposed idea can be found here. On the part of LeanIX, our team created a cross-border database to list the available capabilities of hospitals throughout Europe and their current levels of ICU capacity. Titled the European Hospital Capacity Platform (EHCP), the solution aggregates information from publicly available yet disconnected data sources to offer hospital workers across regions a platform to collaboratively offset medical demands.
Up-to-date information on critical supplies like hospital beds and respiratory support can be tracked from within a single dashboard. Further, a variety of filters can be applied to help hospital staff analyze the capacity of neighboring facilities — the likes of which shown in the video below:
The EHCP was created by re-purposing the functionality of the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management Suite and the LeanIX Cloud Native Suite — two SaaS-based products typically used by IT professionals to document technology landscapes in enterprises. Having recognized that no unified database was available to help European hospital staff share resources during a global crisis, LeanIX’s team — all of whom working from their respective home offices — executed in two days’ time upon the delivery of a pilot solution using dummy data.
Problems were naturally encountered in such a short window of time (e.g., lack of ready-to-use APIs from intensive care registries), but the final version of the EHCP platform submitted to the #WirVsVirus committee has been refined to the point where it can be utilized by doctors and healthcare employees from a native iPhone App. But while access to the EHCP temporarily requires a password, those interested can reach out to me for the time being via Twitter (https://twitter.com/christ_andre) to request a live demo or more information.
Figure 1: Dashboard overview of hospital according to ICU capability and availability status.
Figure 2: List of hospitals, available beds, and ICU and ECMO availability.
Figure 3: A list of total and all used ICU beds at an individual hospital.
Figure 4: The availability status of “ICU High-Care”, “ICU Low-Care”, and “ECMO” (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) throughout a region (Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia).
Figure 5: An analysis of ICU availability by country (Germany).
Figure 6: A regional map showing available ICU / ECMO units across hospitals (Germany)
Figure 7: A list of European data sources for hospital data (one data source, DIVI, is automatically connected).