Supporting Frontline Workers

Health Worker Data Alliance

Supporting health workers through the COVID-19 pandemic with insights into well-being.

As healthcare professionals work on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re at risk of more than just contracting the virus. Witnessing and working to provide for patients every day — often under conditions where capacity is low and the right equipment may be in shortage — has a cumulative effect of draining each professional’s mental and physical well-being. Hospitals needed a simple and cost-effective way to measure and track the physical and mental well-being of health professionals over time – in order to prioritize different kinds of support.

8th Light Health Workers Data Alliance tablet

Prioritizing healthcare workers’ needs.

8th Light partnered with the Health Worker Data Alliance and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation to build the standalone application. The Health Worker Data Alliance survey monitors the physical, psychological, and occupational experiences of health workers with recurring surveys. The data from these surveys will help institutions and policymakers assess which healthcare workers need the most help, and how to prioritize their needs.

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8th Light provided clear communication, rationalization of architectural choices, and all around great delivery. The documentation and handoff notes provided at the end of the project were the best I've seen on a technical project.

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Building a better data pipeline.

The engine behind the front-end application is a custom React form. The 8th Light team developed a mobile-first design that can support multiple different languages of questions and answers, and implemented mobile-friendly sensitivity scales to make a smoother UX for repeat survey-takers without storing any data that would violate HIPAA compliance.

Leveraging Tableau for data visualization, Athena to pass data into Tableau, and Parquet for long-format data analysis, the team worked backward to fill out the system infrastructure. All data was hosted in S3 and configured with Athena and Tableau to allow data scientists and data visualization experts to perform their queries and build their analyses directly in their app of choice without duplicating hosting costs.

Synthesizing citywide trends.

With the application now live and receiving data from health professionals, HWDA data analysts are able to create an evolving set of visualizations and reports at different levels of depth — from single hospital systems to citywide. In the future, the initiative may add reporting for individual workers to self-monitor their working conditions and their own responses over time.