Monitoring COVID-19 Pandemic at the Department of Veterans Affairs

Monitoring COVID-19 Pandemic at the Department of Veterans Affairs

The pandemic involving COVID-19 continues to mature in the U.S. and worldwide, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is in a unique position as the largest integrated healthcare system in the country, in having to simultaneously address the pandemic and being tasked with the tough challenge of addressing the health needs of our nations Veterans, while also being highly scrutinized by public perceptions.

VA serves a population of over twenty million Veterans and is the critical health resource to aged Veterans who are particularly at risk from COVID-19. Nearly half of all Veterans used at least one VA benefit or service in FY16, with over 9 million Veterans enrolled in VA health care system in FY17. This high volume of system utilization means that Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities can potentially expect to see a surge of patients currently or in the near future. The median age of 64 years for male Veterans is a particular cause of concern given COVID-19’s risks to older individuals. VA has over 150 hospitals and over 1,200 outpatient sites located across 18 Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) in the United States with more than one per State, making it the largest integrated health care system in the country. The size of VA presents unique challenges to providing care, educating the Veteran population on precautions, and understanding public perceptions of both the virus itself and VA response to it.

Making educated and real-time decisions in an evolving crisis requires using multiple disparate information sources and applying advanced research methods to better understand the public’s reaction to the crisis. Applying these advanced capabilities can help improve decisionmakers understanding of public perception and trust in effectiveness of government policies, countermeasures, and facilities, and allow localized management of the evolving crisis, including improved messaging and communication. With the priority of creating better health outcomes for our Veterans and citizens, real-time knowledge of public perceptions and opinions can help inform VA on how to strategically communicate with patients and increase preparedness by understanding sentiment before patients arrive at a VA facility.

VA is already taking great strides in preventive measures against the virus including direction to:

1) Call before visiting

2) If you visit a VA health care facility, you will be asked screening questions

3) Leave time for screening[1]

This direction and communication can be even better informed by an integrated public opinion assessment platform that clearly communicates public perceptions, preparedness, and reaction to this emerging pandemic threat.

Ipsos’ capability to combine real-time social media data; newspaper and other digital public opinion streams with traditional gold-standard survey data; and application of our proprietary algorithms and deep knowledge of environments to make these data streams and outputs actionable, provides our clients with unique insight during crisis moments, for patient experience tracking in a military health care setting, and for political forecasting. Our approach further relies on integrating insights from social media analytics, Internet of Things[2] data, financial transaction[3] data, and Human Movement data[4] to assess both national and hyper-local social disruption associated with COVID-19, including local adaptation to health crisis response, to government countermeasures, and to identify health-related digital disinformation campaigns (“fake news”). These real-time data streams can be fully integrated with existing survey platforms to create an omnichannel feedback tool.

While COVID-19 is a very urgent matter as an emerging pandemic, this data collection methodology and analysis can be used to continually gauge the public’s sentiment towards VA across varying political climates, the implementation of new legislation or policy such as the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act of 2018, and any other planned or unplanned circumstances that might create a change in the way people regard VA.

For our detailed report outlining the metrics behind our biosurveillance platform click here

For more information on COVID-19 please click here

For the latest VA updates on coronavirus click here

[1] VA is ready for coronavirus — and working to protect you - https://www.blogs.va.gov/VAntage/72615/vas-recommendations-help-slow-covid-19-virus/

[2] Internet of Things: Applying advanced analytics to the huge volumes of information companies are already collecting from consumer technology. This data may include traffic and environmental sensors as well as retail foot traffic sensors.

[3] Financial data may include anonymized credit card transactions associated with purchases of COVID-19 protective equipment.

[4] Human Movement/Mobility Patterns: Applying advanced analytics to the collection of large-scale, longitudinal data about human mobility that is tracked via anonymized cell phones and app data.