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Goal
To help a medical staffing agency that provides temporary workers to clinics and hospitals on an as-needed basis. The analysis will help plan for influenza season, a time when additional staff are in high demand. The final results will examine trends in influenza and how they can be used to proactively plan for staffing needs across the country.
Business Requirements
As an analyst, I need technical skills to analyze the data and soft skills to communicate my insights to stakeholders. I’ll start by distilling business requirements and requests into questions I can answer with an analysis. I’ll follow up by sourcing and curating the data to address these questions. After analyzing the data and drawing conclusions or formulating recommendations from my results, I’ll present my insights to stakeholders in an easily consumable format.
Project Overview
● Motivation:
The United States has an influenza season where more people than usual suffer from the flu. Some people, particularly those in vulnerable populations, develop serious complications and end up in the hospital. Hospitals and clinics need additional staff to adequately treat these extra patients. The medical staffing agency provides this temporary staff.
● Objective:
Determine when to send staff, and how many, to each state.
● Scope:
The agency covers all hospitals in each of the 50 states of the United States, and the project will plan for the upcoming influenza season.
Stakeholder Identification
- Medical agency frontline staff (nurses, physician assistants, and doctors)
- Hospitals and clinics using the staffing agency’s services
- Influenza patients
- Staffing agency administrators
Success Factors
The project’s success will be based on:
- A staffing plan that utilizes all available agency staff per state requirements, without necessitating additional resources
- Minimal instances of understaffing and overstaffing across states (a state can be considered understaffed if the staff-to-patient ratio is lower than 90% of the required ratio and overstaffed if greater than 110%)
Assumptions & Constraints
Assumptions:
- Vulnerable populations suffer the most-severe impacts from the flu and are the most likely to end up in the hospital.
- Flu shots decrease the chance of becoming infected with the flu.
Constraints:
- The staffing agency has a limited number of nurses, physician assistants, and doctors on staff.
- There’s no money to hire additional medical personnel.
Requirements
- Provide information to support a staffing plan, detailing what data can help inform the timing and spatial distribution of medical personnel throughout the United States.
- Determine whether influenza occurs seasonally or throughout the entire year. If seasonal, does it start and end at the same time (month) in every state?
- Prioritize states with large vulnerable populations. Consider categorizing each state as low-, medium-, or high-need based on its vulnerable population count.
- Assess data limitations that may prevent you from conducting your desired analyses.
Glossary
Influenza: a contagious viral infection, often causing fever and aches. Vulnerable populations: patients likely to develop flu complications requiring additional care, as identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These include adults over 65 years, children under 5 years, and pregnant women, as well as individuals with HIV/AIDs, cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, and children with neurological disorders.
Additional Context
A count of the historical influenza deaths gives an indication of the severity of flu in an area. Deaths can be prevented with flu shots and adequate medical staff. In the United States, each state has a different population composition, meaning that some states will have more vulnerable populations. In this project, you should pay particular attention to influenza deaths, vulnerable populations, and (optionally) flu-shot rates—particularly in vulnerable populations—to determine medical staffing needs.
Stakeholder Quotes
Influenza Patient:
“I missed work the day they were providing flu shots.”
Hospital Nurse:
“The babies really suffer when they have the flu. I just moved to Utah this year, and flu season is so much worse here with the state’s high birth rates.”
Physician:
“Being located in Florida near so many retirement communities, we see a lot of elderly patients during influenza season. These patients have a much higher risk of complications and fatality than normal.”
Medical Staffing Agency Administrator:
“We do see a big difference between states. States differ a lot in their populations and their efforts at prevention. We should take these into account for our planning.”
Data Sets
The following data sets covering influenza in the United States will be used during the project:
- Influenza deaths by geography, time, age, and gender Source: CDC Download Data Set
- Population data by geography Source: US Census Bureau Download Data Set NOTE: keep in mind that these numbers are estimates, hence the sum of the numbers from the different age groups may not sum up to the total in the first columns, but that’s totally okay.
- Counts of influenza laboratory test results by state (survey) Source: CDC (Fluview) Download Influenza Visits Data Set Download Lab Tests Data Set
- Survey of flu shot rates in children Source: CDC Download Data Set
Analysis Criteria
- explain what cleaning conduct on the data.
- select and integrate at least two relevant data sets from different sources.
- identify or create a hypothesis that then test with the data.
- look at the relationship between variables with at least one correlation found.
- include spatial and temporal visualizations in final deliverable.
- Include conclusions, recommendations, and proposed next steps in final presentation.
- consider the audience when determining which analysis components to include in final presentation.
| Tools used | Process |
|---|---|
| Excel | Cleaned, Transformed, Integrated, Summarized |
| Tableau | Data Visualization |