Purpose: To support improvements in surgical efficiencies and throughput within British Columbia's surgical system using data visualization.
Warmest welcome! 🎉🎉🎉 Accueil chaleureux! 🎉🎉🎉
Thank you for visiting the Surgical System Visualization Application project repository.
This document (README.md) is designed to give you overall information about the project. Please click to one of the sections below to jump to the content you want or simply scroll down to find out more. 😊
- What is the Surgical System Visualization Application? (And why is it important?)
- Who are we?
- About this Dashboard
- Describe the dataset
- Interested in contributing to our project?
- Contact us
- Acknowledgements and references
During these pandemic years, when medical resources are stretched beyond their capacity, supporting medical system decision makers as they look to improve system efficiencies and secure financial and non-monetary resources is more important than ever. Following are the problems we are facing and the solutions our project proposes:
These datapoints must be synthesized, analyzed and interpreted in a timely fashion by those leading healthcare decision making.
Improving surgical efficiency and maximizing surgical completion counts has been at the forefront of healthcare discourse in BC for over a decade.[12],[13] Surgical case completions has been used as a blunt metric for surgical efficiencies. [14] A thourough understanding of the current numbers of waiting and completed cases is an essential starting point for any systems based decisions.
It is well documented that surgical delays are associated with negative medical outcomes. [1],[2],[3] In an effort to minimize these effects, surgical wait time benchmarks have been established and are monitored across the province of BC for several surgical procedures.[4],[5],[6] The dataset accessed for this report was purpose built to facilitate evaluation of surgical demand by monitoring wait lists and wait times.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has been found to have had a profound impact on the health care system.[7],[8],[9] Public Health measures in BC have been implemented to maintain healthcare operations with a continued focus on surgical throughtput. Despite these efforts, surgical delays and cancellations have occurred across the province periodically since early 2020. [10], [11] Understanding the degree of these delays is important for administrators and all British Columbians.
Through interactive graphical and numeric visualizations, the proposed application will be designed to:
- Assess historical and current surgical resource/demand relationships in an effort to proactively secure future health care personal, infrastructure and funding.
- Support health authority administrators as they develop their 2022/23 Surgical Funding Proposal for the upcoming BC Ministry of Health Resource Allocation Meeting.
- Review the impact of Covid-19 on surgical demand and throughput.
- Identify surgical procedures within health authorities that are exceeding surgical wait-time benchmarks.
We are a group of 4 students - Anqi Li, Andrew Nguyen, Kevin Radford and Monica Penner - in the Master of Data Science program at UBC Okanagan, class of 2021-2022, working on this project as a milestone for DATA 551.
- Anqi Li: I like to try new things and want to do something creative :)
- Andrew Nguyen: I never give up.
- Monica Penner: My current-self despises exercise but I still do it because I know my future-self will be grateful.
- Kevin Radford: I'm a good problem solver.
The app uses six radio buttons to delivery corresponding information for the six health authorities. We designed five tabs to display of our data and variables. The first tab provides summary information about the dashboard in overall. The second tab provides the information about the number of waiting and completed cases summary and for different procedure groups. The third tab provides the information about the number of waiting and completed cases summary and for different hospitals. The fourth tab provides summary information on average wait times, and for both 50% and 90% of cases completed by procedure. The fifth tab provides summary information on average wait times, and for both 50% and 90% of cases completed by hospitals. Data is displayed for five tabs can be visualized over selected health authorities.
The proposed application will visualize British Columbia surgical related data contained within the historic 2009 to 2021 and the current 2021/22 BC Surgical Wait Time databases. Data points are collected for all surgical procedures performed in all hospital facilities across the province. Hospitals are additionally grouped by their respective Health Authorities. Both datasets contain the number of patients waiting for surgery (waiting), number of completed surgical procedures (completed) and the 50th and 90th percentile surgical wait times in weeks (completed_50th_percentile and completed_90th_percentile, respectively). The data is for elective surgical procedures for patients of all ages and includes scheduled inpatient and day surgery cases. This data does not include unscheduled surgical cases. The data points are aggregated on a quarterly basis. Additionally the datasets contain summation data for all procedures, all hospitals and all health authorities. Using this data, the proposed app will also visualize new variables for predicted future wait list and surgical completion counts as well as anticipated wait-times (projected_wait_list, projected_completed, projected_wait_time). Please refer to the accompanying EDA.ipynb for a more in depth exploration and analysis of the datasets.
Our primary goal is to support BC surgical system and while the app is aimed at BC administrators. Recognizing that for the community, your contributions to us are very important. If you would like to contribute to this project and make it better, your help is extremely welcome. By supporting the professional development of any and all of our contributors, we're thrilled to patch another hole in the leaky pipeline. This is a fantastic chance for you if you want to learn to code, collaborate with others, gain experience writing grant applications, or apply your abilities to the digital arena. If you think you can help in any part of this project please feel free to send us a pull request. How to make a clean pull request please refer to the steps below.
Please keep in mind that maintaining a good and supportive environment for everyone who wishes to join is also important to us. When you join us, we expect you to adhere to our code of conduct.
- Create a personal fork of the project on Github.
- Clone the fork on your local machine. Your remote repo on Github is called
origin. - Add the original repository as a remote called
upstream. - If you created your fork a while ago be sure to pull upstream changes into your local repository.
- Create a new branch to work on! Branch from
developif it exists, else frommaster. - Implement/fix your feature, comment your code.
- Follow the code style of the project, including indentation.
- Write or adapt tests as needed.
- Add or change the documentation as needed.
- Push your branch to your fork on Github, the remote
origin. - From your fork open a pull request in the correct branch. Target the project's
developbranch if there is one, else go formaster! - Once the pull request is approved and merged you can pull the changes from
upstreamto your local repo and delete your extra branch(es).
Package dependencies can be installed using pip or conda. Make sure you installed python and pip/conda using this Instruction Guidlines. In order to install this dashboard app and run in your local computer, please follow these steps:
1.-Open a terminal in your local computer, navigate to a location you desired using cd path and clone our project from this Github repository using command:
git clone https://github.com/ubco-mds-2021-labs/dashboard1-group-f.git
2.-In the terminal, navigate to the project directory using cd path and run the following command, please note if there is any package dependency missing please install using pip install package_name:
python app.py
3.-Copy the link localhost from the terminal and enter to your web browser to view the dash app.
We'd love to hear from you if you have a problem or a suggestion for improvement; just open an issue on this github repository and we'll take care of it straight away.
Data in this project sourced from: British Columbia's Government