The CHIME (COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model for Epidemics) App is designed to assist hospitals and public health officials understand hospital capacity needs as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. CHIME enables capacity planning by providing estimates of total daily (i.e. new) and running totals of (i.e. census) inpatient hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and patients requiring ventilation. These estimates are generated using a SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered) model, a standard epidemiological modeling technique. Our model has been reviewed by several epidemiologists including Michael Z. Levy, PhD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine.
CHIME allows individuals to prepare their hospitals, cities, and regions for the looming crisis. It specifically allows users to forecast the expected number of in-hospital patients and daily admissions so that they can estimate the impact in their location and when they will need to have mitigation strategies in place.
CHIME is being used by numerous organizations. We’ve had outreach from all around the US and the world. We can't list exact users without their permission but we can tell you that we’ve had traffic from over 150 countries!
We launched the app on 2020/03/15, and the team put in a heroic effort to stabilize it in less than a week. We are actively implementing more features and enhancements as users identify additional needs. Our current goal is to release updates every week.
Please check the Release Notes for updates on the app!
The following resources provide additional insight into CHIME and techniques used. They are a good starting point for anyone interested in using CHIME for their own purposes: