With all three of NYU Langone Health’s hospitals filling fast with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients last March, Dean and CEO Robert I. Grossman, MD, called for a digital surveillance tool to monitor and map daily clinical trends across the health system. “Dean Grossman recognizes that without reliable data, you’re flying blind,” notes Fritz François, MD, chief medical officer and patient safety officer. “If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.”

Dr. François immediately developed a template with Samuel Levine, director of operations and resourcing, who helped spearhead a collaboration with clinical and operational leaders across the institution to develop a customized COVID-19 dashboard—an extension of the electronic dashboard already in place to track institutional performance measures. “Evidence-based decisions would be based on these numbers,” Levine says, “so they had to be current, correct, and validated.”

By 10:30PM on March 16, within eight hours of the dean’s initial request, the first iteration of the new COVID-19 dashboard was sent to the Executive Leadership Group. Highlighting 9 metrics that eventually expanded to 25, it tracks daily changes in admissions to the emergency departments and ICUs, intubations and ventilations, bed capacity, and other key indicators of how an outbreak is impacting NYU Langone. Dean Grossman considers the assessment tool such an exemplary model for how academic medical centers can inform epidemiology that he has shared it with the federal government. “We can’t just react,” explains Dr. Grossman. “We have to stay ahead of the crisis. The dashboard enables us to see trends and patterns in real time. It keeps us agile.”