The coronavirus affects different people in different ways.
To make sense of the risk, 13 students at Brandeis International Business School recently helped a Texas company build an interactive
COVID-19 Comorbidity Dashboard using 8.4 million health records and over 697 million data points.
Students from the
Master of Arts in International Economics and Finance (MA) and
Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) programs partnered with the company InterGen Data as part of the International Business School’s
Field Projects program.
The students designed the dashboard as a simple, intuitive web app that accounts for race, age, gender and pre-existing conditions. The tool combines those factors, which have a significant influence on determining the severity of a patient’s COVID-19 symptoms, to produce a likelihood of hospitalization and death.
“Over the course of three semesters, this successful collaboration with InterGen Data provided our students with the opportunity to collect, organize and analyze COVID-19 data, create engaging data visualizations, and build an interactive web app,” said
Prof. Ahmad Namini, the faculty advisor on the InterGen Data field project. “Experiential learning is foundational to our educational philosophy at the International Business School, and this field project allowed our students to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom in a real-world business setting.”
InterGen Data also hired two International Business School students to work as interns on the COVID-19 project.
The company’s data is based on historical daily data collected from every county in the United States. The dashboard produces prediction accuracy for hospitalization at 75.6%, ICU admittance at 76.5%, and death at 82.9%.
“As a Native American Indian with Hispanic blood, I am easily classified as someone who is in the highest-risk and most-impacted categories for COVID-19,” said InterGen Data founder and CEO Robert J. Kirk. “If I contract this virus, I want to know what is likely to happen to me. And I owe it to my family to be properly prepared.”
