Preparing for Influenza Season

Hospital Staffing Project

Background

  • A hospital staffing agency that provides temporary workers to clinics and hospitals wants to plan for the upcoming influenza season. Using exploratory data analysis, the company hopes to identify when and where staff can be placed most effectively.

Objective

  • Identify trends in influenza within the United States to determine when to send staff, and how many, to each state.

Context

  • The agency covers all hospitals in each of the 50 US states. Stakeholders include medical frontline staff, hospital and clinic administrators, patients, and staffing agency executives.

Data Sets

  • Data on deaths from influenza can be found here.

  • Population data can be found here

Steps for Data Preparation and Analysis

  1. Sourcing data and identifying potential biases.

  2. Wrangling and cleaning data in Excel (merging and transforming).

  3. Conducting statistical analyses and developing a hypothesis.

  4. Creating visualizations in Tableau

    1. Temporal, statistical, spatial and textual analysis

  5. Storyboarding and presenting to stakeholders.

Insights and Visualizations

States with large populations have the most mortalities, indicating staff should be placed in direct correlation with population density.

Older populations are more vulnerable.

They account for a majority of deaths from Influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) despite being only about 17% of the total population.

Influenza hits hardest around the holidays in the US.

Each year, the frequency of influenza mortalities increases in the winter and peaks in January.

The reason for the spike is not cold weather alone.

Warm states have peaks and valleys at the same time as cold or temperate states.

Recommendations

  • Staff most heavily in states with both dense and elderly populations.

    • Florida is a prime example and should be focused heavily as a staffing site.

  • Increase staffing levels during winter months beginning before the holiday season

    • Encourage patients to get their flu shots starting well before the holiday season.

  • Influenza is prevalent everywhere, not just in certain regions or climates.

    • Disseminate information about the causes of influenza.

    • Distribute PPE to people looking to travel during the holidays or residing in high-risk environments.