BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Faculty at two of Indiana’s leading business schools — Indiana and Purdue universities — are collaborating on a project with IU Health to help the health care provider manage the COVID-19 demand surge in their 16 hospitals across five regions of the state.
The interdisciplinary team of professors at IU’s Kelley School of Business and Purdue’s Krannert School of Management has been working since March 23 to develop a predictive model of the resources required for an adequate response to the pandemic. It integrates disease prediction with a sophisticated patient flow workload model.
Team co-leaders Jonathan Helm, associate professor of operations and decision technologies and Grant Thornton Scholar at Kelley, said many models for COVID-19 lack the details needed for hospitals to do operational planning.
“A lot of models out there that predict the number of ICUs and ventilators you’re going to need really are back-of-the-envelope calculations,” Helm said. “For example, patient resource requirements in Indianapolis look different from those for patients in Lafayette and Bloomington. These regions have different types of hospitals and different demographics of people they serve, and different population densities, all of which contribute to COVID-19 care resource requirements.
“We are creating a learning model of how the patients in each region of Indiana are being affected and how they differ from those in the national model.”