Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Mar 27, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 17, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 10, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Intensive Care Unit Resource Planning During COVID-19 Emergency at the Regional Level: the Italian case
ABSTRACT
Severe acute respiratory syndrome COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has been declared a worldwide emergency and a pandemic disease by the World Health Organisation (WHO). It started in China in December 2019, and it is currently rapidly spreading throughout Italy, which is now the most a ected country after China. There is great atten- tion for the di usion and evolution of the COVID-19 infection which started from the north (particularly in the Lombardia region) and it is now rapidly a ecting other Italian regions. We investigate on the impact of patients hospitalisation in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) at a regional and subregional granularity. We propose a model derived from well-known models in epidemic to estimate the needed number of places in intensive care units. The model will help decision-makers to plan resources in the short and medium-term in order to guarantee appropriate treatments to all patients needing it. We analyse Italian data at regional level up to March 15th aiming to: (i) support health and government decision-makers in gathering rapid and ecient deci- sions on increasing health structures capacities (in terms of ICU slots) and (ii) de ne a scalable geographic model to plan emergency and fu- ture COVID-19 patients management using reallocating them among health structures. Finally, the here proposed model can be useful in countries where COVID-19 is not yet strongly di used.
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