A new COVID-19 calculator is designed to help hospitals prepare

Working at breakneck speed, a team of engineering and medical professionals at Stanford have created two novel computer tools that can tell local governments and hospitals whether they are about to be overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the new calculators provides county-by-county predictions of hospitalizations tied to the coronavirus. The other allows individual hospitals to predict their own shortages of intensive care beds, ventilators and staffing. The tools were developed in mere weeks, starting in mid-March, by a group at Stanford Engineering that specializes in solving operational problems for hospitals. The team, called Systems Utilization for Stanford Medicine or SURF Stanford Medicine, is headed by David Scheinker, an adjunct professor at the School of Engineering and a clinical associate professor at the School of Medicine.