Pandemics & Society Webinar 29th January, “Leveraging COVID-19 hospital data to strengthen decision making in future pandemics”.
For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Lieke Fleur Heupink (Akershus University Hospital). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 29th January at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted healthcare delivery globally, forcing hospital administrators to make difficult ad hoc decisions about postponing or cancelling elective care to ensure adequate capacity for COVID-19 patients. This resulted in missed care and increased waiting times for health services across many countries. While various data-driven models were developed during the pandemic to assist decision makers, most focussed on transmission dynamics and the potential effects from infection prevention and control measures. Although these models provided valuable insight into slowing the spread of disease – buying hospitals more time to prepare – they were not tailored to the unique contexts of individual hospitals. Leveraging facility-level data presents unique opportunities to provide hospital-specific predictions that administrators need for operational planning. This locally gathered hospital data can be used to build analytical models accounting for the diversity within their catchment areas. However, smaller sample sizes at the local level may introduce methodological challenges. Using COVID-19 data from a Norwegian hospital as case study, this research explores how hospital-level data can be utilized to develop tools that provide timely and actionable information to decision makers at individual hospitals, ultimately enhancing their preparedness during future pandemics.
About the Speaker
Lieke Fleur Heupink is a PhD researcher at the Health Service Research Department at Akershus University Hospital and the University of Oslo. She applies epidemiological and health economics methods to analyse COVID-19 data with the aim to strengthen hospital preparedness and response.