Pandemic Partnership

UNM College of Nursing and Sandia National Laboratories Join to Explore COVID-19 Impact on Health Systems

A University of New Mexico College of Nursing research team is partnering with Sandia National Laboratories to explore the impact of COVID-19 outbreaks on hospital surge capacities through computer modeling and advanced data analytics.   

The research is being facilitated through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) signed between the laboratories and the Health Sciences Center.

CRADAs are formal research and development agreements allowing federal laboratories to partner and work with non-federal agencies.  These partnerships can take the form of collaborations as well as the transfer of research information. 

The research team includes Mary Pat Couig, PhD, associate professor and Carter-Fleck Professor in the UNM College of Nursing, Christine E. Kasper, College of Nursing dean, and Patrick Finley and Drew Levin of Sandia National Laboratories.

Through this agreement, entitled “Artificial Intelligence Applied to Improving Health Outcomes,” collaborators will investigate issues that can affect hospital surge capacity, including identification of high risk populations and health care access.  

Sandia brings to the project broad expertise in computational modeling and advanced data analytics.  The HSC team has extensive expertise in public health emergency preparedness, Couig says. 

By applying advanced data analytics to electronic medical records, researchers will work toward analyzing how the pandemic is affecting today’s medical organizations. The hope is that combining the lab’s computing resources with New Mexico-specific demographics and medical history health data will provide a roadmap for allocating resources and anticipating how hospitals might be better prepared for adverse events in the future.

“This collaborative research agreement can help provide exciting future research opportunities for faculty and students of the College of Nursing and the wider UNM HSC community to apply artificial intelligence, data analytics and modeling across a wide range of nursing, health care and public health issues in the state,” Couig says.