Course: Secondary Use of COVID-19 Symptom Incidence Among Hospital Employees as an Example of Syndromic Surveillance of Hospital Admissions Within 7 Days
CME Credits: 1.00
Released: 2021-06-17
Key Points
Question Can secondary use of employee symptom attestation data be used as syndromic surveillance to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations in the communities where the employees live?Findings In this cohort study of 6481 hospital employees, an increased frequency of COVID-19 symptoms reported by all employees at a single hospital was associated with increased hospitalizations across 10 hospitals 7 days later.
Meaning These findings suggest that in a novel pandemic before reliable testing is available, use of nontraditional secondary data sources can be used to estimate hospital demand.
Abstract
Importance Alternative methods for hospital occupancy forecasting, essential information in hospital crisis planning, are necessary in a novel pandemic when traditional data sources such as disease testing are limited.Objective To determine whether mandatory daily employee symptom attestation data can be used as syndromic surveillance to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations in the communities where employees live.
Design, Setting, and Participants This cohort study was conducted from April 2, 2020, to November 4, 2020, at a large academic hospital network of 10 hospitals accounting for a total of 2384 beds and 136,000 discharges in New England. The participants included 6841 employees who worked on-site at hospital 1 and lived in the 10 hospitals’ service areas.
Exposure Daily employee self-reported symptoms were collected using an automated text messaging system from a single hospital.
Main Outcomes and Measures Mean absolute error (MAE) and weighted mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 7-day forecasts of daily COVID-19 hospital census at each hospital.
Results Among 6841 employees living within the 10 hospitals’ service areas, 5120 (74.8%) were female individuals and 3884 (56.8%) were White individuals; the mean (SD) age was 40.8 (13.6) years, and the mean (SD) time of service was 8.8 (10.4) years. The study model had a MAE of 6.9 patients with COVID-19 and a weighted MAPE of 1.5% for hospitalizations for the entire hospital network. The individual hospitals had an MAE that ranged from 0.9 to 4.5 patients (weighted MAPE ranged from 2.1% to 16.1%). For context, the mean network all-cause occupancy was 1286 during this period, so an error of 6.9 is only 0.5% of the network mean occupancy. Operationally, this level of error was negligible to the incident command center. At hospital 1, a doubling of the number of employees reporting symptoms (which corresponded to 4 additional employees reporting symptoms at the mean for hospital 1) was associated with a 5% increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations at hospital 1 in 7 days (regression coefficient, 0.05; 95% CI, 0.02-0.07; P?<?.001).
Conclusions and Relevance This cohort study found that a real-time employee health attestation tool used at a single hospital could be used to estimate subsequent hospitalizations in 7 days at hospitals throughout a larger hospital network in New England.
Educational Objective
To identify the key insights or developments described in this article
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