Health Sufficiency Indicators for Pandemic Monitoring

Javier M. Moguerza, Salvador Perelló Oliver, Isaac Martín de Diego, Víctor Aceña, Carmen Lancho, Marina Cuesta and César González Fernández
Additional contact information
Javier M. Moguerza: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Salvador Perelló Oliver: Methaodos.org, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Isaac Martín de Diego: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Víctor Aceña: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Carmen Lancho: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
Marina Cuesta: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain
César González Fernández: Data Science Laboratory, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 Móstoles, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 10, 1-21

Abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, spreading all around the world and causing a worldwide pandemic, has lead to the collapse of the health systems of the most affected countries. Due to the ease of transmission, early prevention measures are proved to be fundamental to control the pandemic and, hence, the saturation of the health systems. Given the difficulty of obtaining characteristics of these systems of different countries and regions, it is necessary to define indicators based on basic information that enable the assessment of the evolution of the impact of a disease in a health system along with fair comparisons among different ones. This present paper introduces the Health Sufficiency Indicator ( H S I ), in its accumulated and daily versions. This indicator measures the additional pressure that a health care system has to deal with due to a pandemic. Hence, it allows to evaluate the capacity of a health system to give response to the corresponding needs arising from a pandemic and to compare the evolution of the disease among different regions. In addition, the Potential Occupancy Ratio ( P O R ) in both its hospital ward bed and ICU bed versions is here introduced to asses the impact of the pandemic in the capacity of hospitals. These indicators and other well-known ones are applied to track the evolution of the impact of the disease on the Spanish health system during the first wave of the pandemic, both on national and regional levels. An international comparison among the most affected countries is also performed.

Keywords: indicators; COVID-19; fusion of information; health; time series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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