In the latest stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, providers worldwide are confronting the unique challenges of vaccinating their populations. And for the Italian province of Bolzano, the Johns Hopkins ACG System helped quickly develop a data-driven vaccination priority list.

In essence, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano consulted with Effepici Solutions, to link ACG System data to health organizational data to develop a method of organizing the population into different priority groups based on guidance issued by the Italian Government. The resulting business intelligence system (BI-CG) used different patient characteristics such as presence of certain chronic conditions, complexity due to multimorbidity, or likelihood of hospitalization to segment the population into six different priority groups for vaccination.

The ACG System data used included the diagnostic based groups (Expanded Diagnostic Clusters or EDCs), the Resource Utilization Bands (or RUBS, as a measure of complexity), the frailty flag and one of the predictive models to identify people most at risk of an unplanned hospitalization. The data was filtered multiple times to locate those patients most in need of vaccination due to their high health care needs and to create the six priority groups starting with the 3% of highest risk patients who need to be vaccinated first. The BI-CG tool was also able to remove data relating to any patients who were deceased or those who contracted COVID-19 or tested positive in the last 90 days.

The result? A targeted list of patients with the highest need for vaccination, validated by specific health data and generated in just one week. Ultimately, this implementation showcases how the ACG System can quickly generate in-depth assessments of patient data to support crucial health care interventions.

ACG System summary of the Bolzano population through the BI-CG business intelligence system

Selection of a category of patients to be vaccinated with reference to EDC, RUB and probability of hospitalization at 12 months