Medical Staffing for Influenza
In preparation for the upcoming flu season, a medical temporary staffing agency is requesting analysis of flu patients, state infection rates, and infection timing to guide their planning. Due to limited extra staff available, it is important to focus on states with the highest need and when that help is needed.
This analysis will guide staffing plans and address the staffing agency’s primary questions:
Determine seasonality of the flu
Understand the characteristics of flu patients
Identify state priority by volume of vulnerable populations
Prioritize states that require additional medical staffing
Tools used
Excel
Tableau
Skills required
Data wrangling and subsetting
Consistency checks
Data cleaning
Data merging
Deriving variables
Grouping data
Aggregating data
Statistical hypothesis testing
Visualizations in Tableau
Reporting in Excel
Initial Exploratory Analysis
Working to understand the tables, data available, and relationships between tables
A data profile is used to capture general facts about the data available
Basic statistics (max, min, mean, median) can be used to identify outliers or anomalies that need to be addressed
Data Checks and Cleaning
Testing the data integrity and cleaning the data as needed
Excel pivot tables can be used to view aggregated data like row counts and row labels.
On the left, we have identified that the year 20133 has been entered incorrectly instead of 2013.
On the right, states include an inconsistent mix of state names and abbreviations.
These and other issues found are handled in data cleaning.
Clean data and log all changes made
Join multiple data sets to create one that can support that analysis required.
Here, we’ve combined the age groups, state populations, and death data to one data set.
Analysis
Provide a full analysis of the data to properly allocate temporary medical staff for the upcoming flu season
Flu deaths by age range
Over age 65 shows a significant increase in flu death volume
What to do differently
This visualization is useful, but the outliers of each group tend to imply that 55-64 age range is worse off than 65-74. It might be good to include with this a visualization that emphasizes the real body portion.
Population and flu deaths
States with the highest populations are shown to require the most temporary staffing support during flu season.
It is these states that will receive priority in staffing followed by the other states.
Age group population by deaths
As population increases for each age group, we can confirm that the patients over age 65 show the greatest impact to death counts
Flu Season Final Report and Recommendations
Who is impacted most by Flu season?
The greatest impacted age group from Flu is 65 and over. Other age groups do see a minimal impact, but not nearly as much as the 65 and older population. The correlation between age and flu deaths indicate that this age group will benefit most from additional staffing.
Where is staffing needed?
The states with the highest populations also show the greatest need for medical support.
Emphasis should be given to California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Other states may benefit from additional staffing, but these states take priority.
When is extra staffing needed?
January, February, and March show the greatest impact from flu. Depending on available temporary staffing, consider extending to December and April for greatest coverage and support.