Preparing for influenza season
Context and objective
Context
There are billions of cases of seasonal influenza annually and it causes hundreds of thousands of respiratory deaths annually.
In health systems across the globe, flu cases add to the workload of hospitals, increasing the number of hospital visits at certain times of the year, and it can negatively affect certain demographics in society differently.
Hospitals and clinics need additional staff to adequately treat these extra patients during the flu season.
Client
A US-based medical staffing agency, responsible for providing temporary staff to a number of health institutions across the US to deal with extra demand on services.
Objective
To inform decisions on where and when to send staff in the upcoming flu season.
Data and tools
The dataset used for this analysis was an open source dataset from a gaming website and contained information on annual video game sales by region, genre and platform.
Dataset
A number of separate open source datasets was used for this project. The datasets contained information on deaths by geography (US), population data by geography, influenza test results by US state, influenza hospital visits and laboratory tests data.
Influenza deaths by geography, Source: CDC (Center for Disease Control)
Population data by geography, time, age, and gender, Source: US Census Bureau
Counts of influenza laboratory test results by state (survey), Source: CDC (Fluview) – Influenza Visits Data Set and Lab Tests
Survey of flu shot rates in children, Source: CDC
Tools
Excel, Tableau and PowerPoint
Procedures
→ Translating business requirements
→ Data cleaning
→ Data integration
→ Data transformation
→ Statistical hypothesis testing
→ Visual analysis
→ Forecasting
→ Storytelling in Tableau
→ Presenting results to an audience
