COVID-19 has imposed significant strain on Ontario’s health care system. Pre-existing socioeconomic barriers to health not only exacerbate the challenges of healthcare delivery but they have been shown to impact the outcome of COVID-19 patients as well. Our interactive COVID-19 Resource Allocation Tool is designed to provide much needed assistance to the Ontario Ministry of Health and researchers to coordinate an effort of the healthcare resource deployment across Ontario public health units.

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Each Ontario PHU is assigned a rating from 1-5, where a higher rating indicates a greater need for healthcare resources.

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The interactive tool consists of the following:

1. Map of Ontario PHU integrated with their ratings.

2. Spectrum ordered PHU by their ratings.

3. Treemap categorizing PHU into different groups based on healthcare resource need.

4. Plots examining different socioeconomic indicators used in the analysis against COVID-19 statistics.

Deliverables

View One-Pager

Interactive Toolkit

https://public.tableau.com/views/medcare_dashboard/map_dashboard?:language=en-US&:embed=y&:sid=&:redirect=auth&:embed_code_version=3&:loadOrderID=0&:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

Methods

  1. We collected data COVID-19 indicators, including COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalization rater per 100,000 people.We also collected data on the following socioeconomic factors: population density, senior population density (age 65+), Ontario marginalization index measures (instability, deprivation, dependency, and ethnic concentration), low-income measure after tax (LIM-AT) percentage, and household size.The data is accurate as of September 1, 2020.
  2. Each of the metrics were scaled by computing z-scores. We have attached the clustering results in the graphic below.
  3. Direct and indirect z-scores were plotted and k-means clustering was used to group PHU into groups.
  4. The centroid of each cluster was located and we ranked the sums from lowest to highest.
  5. The average of all of the paired ratings served as the overall rating for each PHU.

Results

The rating results consistency highlight the Toronto Public Health region with the greatest need for healthcare resources. This is in parallel with the highest measurements of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths occurred. In terms of socioeconomic factors, population density emerges with the strongest correlation to COVID-19 hospitalization and death rates.

A future retrospective analysis of the Resource Allocation Tool will provide us with much needed insights into the accuracy of our model and future areas for improvement.

Acknowledgements