Blog

Introducing a PPE Calculator for use with CHIME

May 7, 2020

CHIME was built to assist hospital systems project the resources that would be required due to the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily focusing on bed and ventilator demand. A natural extension is to use the projected hospital censuses to evaluate the amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) needed. In our latest release, we include a PPE calculator, accessible at the CHIME website, that works in conjunction with your CHIME-generated projections. PPE forecasting Personal protective equipment (PPE) such...

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CHIME 1.1.0 released, mid-growth stage updates

Mar 30, 2020

What has changed? The original version of the CHIME model was built in the context of the first few days of a local outbreak. It was not well equipped to handle projections when there is a non-small number of current infections. Release 1.1.0 addresses this by allowing the user to specify not only how many cases are currently hospitalized, but also, optionally, how long it has been since the first case was hospitalized. Projecting the...

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Updating CHIME Input Parameters Based on New COVID-19 Regional Observations

Mar 24, 2020

Last week, we began forecasting the potential levels of demand for hospital resources that could result from the outbreak with COVID-19. The timing of this forecasting effort coincided within two days of the admission of the first COVID-19 patient into the UPenn health system. Since we didn’t yet have many data points for the model, we instead set parameters from regional reports and various publications. Now that a little over a week has passed, we...

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CHIME 0.5.0 released with major updates

Mar 23, 2020

What was fixed Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis forces us to move quickly and one downside of moving quickly is it’s easier to make mistakes. Our latest release of CHIME contains a major bug fix to the way we were calculating daily admissions and census. In the previous version of CHIME, we were not properly accounting for recovered (previously infected) patients in our accounting of newly admitted patients. This was resulting in an undercount of admissions...

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CHIME comparison with Imperial College COVID-19 Publication

Mar 18, 2020

A few days ago we launched CHIME, a tool for COVID-19 hospital capacity planning. CHIME’s simplified model design and interface enables quick support for hospital planners to assess potential demand for resources over time. It also allows transparent and understandable parameters for our partners to interrogate and modify as more information becomes available. The recent paper from Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team gives us a window into another model, set of assumptions, and resulting projections....

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