Indiana's rapid response to COVID-19

Robert Cochrane:

What does governance mean? It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but in the context of what we're talking about today, governance, the State of Indiana talks about the data and who can take what actions with what data and when and under what circumstances and using what methods are we allowed to do this, to use data and to move it back and forth.

Robert Cochrane:

The State of Indiana came up in 2019 with this mission statement for their Data Governance Council. It is about ensuring that FSSA has the best tools, the best data for the most people possible within the highest skill set so that they can serve the constituents, Hoosiers of all ages. The field work, if you will, that was done through the governance, really enabled the COVID sharing of data and the communication between agencies.

Steve Johnson:

With Indiana, OptumServe's been working with them for, oh, four months. Now my team does daily reporting to help the state to kind of prioritize their testing efforts. You can see on the top left the total volume of tests. How many tests did we do yesterday? How many tests have we done this week?

Steve Johnson:

Indiana's doing great. They get the majority of their test results back under two days, which in comparison to many states in the country, that's pretty fast. Indiana has been extremely strategic about where am I going to put the testing sites and am I going to change any testing sites or expand capacity so that I can reach the most residents in the states. We keep track of the high volume sites to a) make keep them open, but then b) do we want to expand their capacity?

Steve Johnson:

The other thing that we provide for the state is just the ability to look at counties that are at risk in the sense that if COVID starts to expand in that county there could be a real problem, there could be a real outbreak.

Robert Cochrane:

All of that information, and it flows into the state and it really is helping Hoosiers on the front lines of the virus handle what is coming to them. The critical success factor for the State of Indiana has been the buy-in to the need for governance from the top of the organization.

Robert Cochrane:

The state's been very good and very deliberate from the beginning, and very deliberate about setting an expectation of why we're doing this, and then I'm going to train you, I'm going to make sure you're part of these working groups so you understand why we're doing these things, and some of the problems that get created when we don't follow policy and procedure. It was just not a policy handed down, but it was a culture shift in a way of doing business.

Robert Cochrane:

By having that governance done and having those conversations going, it eliminated some of the delays and lags and bumps and things like that, that if there was no governance in place could have held things up. The quicker you can get to sharing data and getting it onto eyes that understand what it is, the better it is and the more efficient that data becomes in helping predict and produce outcomes.