Page 44 - FCW, August 2020

CaseStudy
Virginia consolidates
COVID response data
The state’s award-winning platform for tracking opioid addiction has been expanded to help officials manage the pandemic
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
Virginia’s Framework for Addiction Analysis and Community Transformation (FAACT) is a cloud- based data-sharing and analytics platform that was launched in 2018 to give state and local officials the ability spot and respond to dangerous trends in opioid abuse in near-real time while protecting privacy. Now it’s being put to use to tackle the coronavirus.
FAACT’s success earned the platform the Best in Class Government Innovation Award for state and local projects in 2019. This year, officials augmented FAACT with new datasets, data sources and capabilities to help them manage two critical aspects of the response to the pandemic: the capacity of the state’s health care system to handle COVID-19 patients and the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE).
The platform gathers data such as the number of hospital beds and ventilators available, the number in use by COVID-19 patients and the capacity of intensive care units. That data comes from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM), the Virginia Department of Health (VDH), the Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services and the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA), a private association of hospitals, health care systems and long-term care facilities.
“Having them work with us has been a blessing because we don’t have to go to all of those individual organizations to pull data,” said Carlos Rivero, the state’s chief data officer. “The data providers always have complete control and authority over their datasets whenever they’re engaging in a data-sharing relationship like the one we have.”
That relationship is the Common- wealth Data Trust, a secure and legally compliant information- sharing environment. This means, for example, that VDH removes personally identifiable information from the data it submits, leaving only patients’ ages, genders and relevant dates (symptom onset, hospitalization and death, if applicable).
Customizing intelligence from
the best available data
The information in FAACT is updated
frequently, sometimes as often as every 15 minutes, to provide near- real-time information to decision- makers. It allows them to quickly identify hospitals in need of supplies and pharmaceuticals, locations with the largest outbreaks of COVID-19 cases, and hospitals and regions that have surge capacity.
“We have a consolidated, secure data-sharing platform that all of the data goes into,” Rivero said. “We all understand that this is the best
available data that we have from each of the respective partners.”
Departments can integrate with FAACT in several ways. Some use application programming interfaces that allow them to connect dynamically, while others have someone manually upload a file for automatic ingestion into the platform. The state also offers a software agent that participating organizations can deploy to make data available.
Participants can access the data by logging in or connecting via an API, and Rivero said he is working on enabling access for people who have not contributed data to the platform. Agencies can analyze the data using whatever tools they prefer, but he added that “it doesn’t matter what tool you’re using. The fact that we have one single place where everyone can go to get the most up-to-date, accurate information gives us equal opportunity to build out intelligence products that are meaningful to our own stakeholders. Everyone has their perspective.”
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced the expansion of FAACT on June 12, but VHHA developed its first dashboard in early April, Rivero said.
The benefits have been swift, he added. For instance, at the beginning of the pandemic, many organizations
44 August 2020 FCW.COM