The Challenge

Understanding the impact of COVID-19 infections is inherently a spatial problem. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leadership mandated the United States Border Patrol (USBP) to monitor exposures among their employees throughout the organization, as well as people who entered our border unlawfully. USBP understood the power of spatial analysis that separated it as a higher, results-driven solution in comparison to other dashboards and analytics created by Ardent and wanted similar capability for operating effectively and efficiently during the pandemic.

The Solution

In conjunction with the USBP Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in the Incident Management Group, Ardent visualized reported data on a dashboard that aggregated and parsed data to facilitate evidence-based decision making by USBP executives and managers. Initially, the data came from spreadsheets. After the data reporting was automated, Ardent could import COVID-19 data from Salesforce using an API. The dashboard includes data and meta data for key elements such as total exposure, total positive cases, deceased, quarantine status, hospitalization occurrence, and recovered status.

The Outcome

In April 2020, weeks after the pandemic was declared, Ardent delivered an initial prototype to the USBP Emergency Operation Center and CBP leadership. From start to finish, Ardent delivered this prototype in 10 days. With the quick turnaround of the COVID-19 dashboard, USBP now had crucial COVID-19 exposure data in a way that quality operational decisions could be made quickly. For example, managers could make better border patrol station staffing decisions using factual data about infection rates. USBP was better able to develop an understanding of COVID-19 impacts on the workforce, infection rate utilizing a geographic view of the situation across all USBP sectors and allow for communication of this information providing access to key CBP Enterprise leaders.

Tools used to achieve these outcomes:

• Esri ArcGIS Enterprise Portal