Army Vantage empowers leaders to make data-driven decisions in COVID-19 battle

FORT BELVOIR, Va. – PEO EIS’s Army Vantage team is busy using its game-changing data platform to help Army leaders make data-driven decisions in support of the U.S. military’s fast-paced battle against COVID-19. 

Army Vantage—formerly known as Army Leader Dashboard—enables the Army to “see itself” by providing senior leaders, Soldiers, staff and analytic communities with a common, integrated data platform for visualizing and analyzing the current and predicted future state(s) of the Army.  The Army Vantage team, based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has designed a common operating picture (COP) for visualizing data that is relevant to the Army’s COVID-19 response, including the number of people infected and their location, and an inventory of medical equipment and its location.

“The Vantage team has been of great help in our ongoing COVID-19 fight,” said Dr. David Markowitz, assistant deputy chief of staff, G-8, and chief analytics officer of the Army. “We’ve spent the last year building a foundation of Army data, so we can better see ourselves—specifically on our readiness side—and that has provided a very unique vantage point.”

It has allowed the Army Vantage team to quickly respond to the needs of senior leaders as the Army and DOD focus on protecting the force and supporting state and local authorities to help combat COVID-19.

“Despite none of us having anticipated this as a requirement, we had such a strong data analytics starting point that we now can overlay a COVID-19 COP to help leadership understand where the Army is with respect to the current crisis,” said Markowitz.

Operating on both unclassified and classified networks, Army Vantage connects to and draws relevant data across all domains, powers a set of configurable views, and provides tools for making data-driven decisions at every level of the Army. The platform gives users access and visibility into its troves of authoritative data in numerous databases across the Army enterprise, enabling leaders to make data-driven decisions faster and with increased confidence. The Vantage solution is the first of its kind for the Army, allowing users to assess, understand and improve Army readiness and decision-making.

Miranda Coleman, acting Army Vantage product lead, and her team have been conducting several demonstrations of the prototype’s progress for senior leaders, including Gen. Joseph M. Martin, the Army’s vice chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, director of the Army staff, and even senior leaders from other services.

“The overall intent of these views is to provide a single, integrated COP of any relevant COVID-19 data, including Army status, infected personnel, installation and hospital data, and available medical capacity to help give leaders the ability to make data-driven decisions in response to COVID-19,” said Coleman.

Army Vantage is also working with interagency partners like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and public resources like Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, to gather data, making consistency across all partner data sources a priority, explained Col. Kyle Jette, lead data scientist for Army Vantage.

“Johns Hopkins is an example of an institution where we have to figure out how to bring its data into our environment in an automated fashion,” said Jette. “We’ve also needed to find new partners, such as the Defense Health Agency (DHA), which has a robust amount of data that we are either receiving now or are about to receive. We want to be consistent in what we’re telling Army leaders and in what DHA is telling DOD leaders. The Army answer should be couched and nested with the DOD’s answer so that we’re consistent. That’s very important,” he added.

While the COVID COP is meant to provide a clear picture of what the current state looks like, Jette noted the potential of the Army Vantage platform to make predictions based on available data.

In addition to public data sources, Army Vantage has integrated projects and forecast models from the Center for Army Analysis to assess levels of risk to the force. Installation commanders across the Army will be able to use Army Vantage to assess the impact to their local communities and develop tailored re-opening strategies.

By using community-based data from surrounding communities—such as hospitals, positive cases, etc.—commanders will be able to assess a level of risk tailored to their local areas while saving time and energy. Army Vantage pulls live data, ensuring commanders are making decisions with the most current information. The platform also allows leaders at all levels to better assess each category of readiness through a single point of access to real-time information that is normally spread across multiple disparate systems of record.

The data is also being used to analyze personal protection equipment and ventilator stock across military treatment facilities, units and depots, and will also provide test kit statuses, test results and recovery data. Army Vantage provides information and support to protect the force and understand the impact to specific units, missions and locations that are a part of the Army’s overall response to the pandemic.