Health Warning tracking now available in PredictHQ
PredictHQ launched the ability to track COVID-19 lockdowns and shelter-in-place mandates worldwide in May, and today we’re announcing a significant extension of health issue tracking with our new event category: Health Warnings. These are chaotic times and we are in a unique position at PredictHQ to help you through these times. We've built these categories and tracking to not only make it as simple as possible to track the current environment, but to track any future incidents. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a staggering impact on business and our global economy. While it is hopefully the highest impact health warning of our lifetime, it’s just one of many important health issues that occur each year globally. PredictHQ now enables you to track:
Pandemic warnings
Epidemic warnings
Food poisoning warnings
Biological hazards such as diseases and insect infestations
This is a new category and the way we rank them is similar to how we rank our Natural Disasters category. PredictHQ verifies every event and then ranks them by predicted impact. Rankings include the spread, number of people impacted and the severity of that impact. Pandemics are rare, and most often health warnings are highly localized. Instant updates enable companies to minimize wasted stock and staff investment in the affected areas, while launching marketing campaigns or similar in areas that aren’t affected to make up for the lost revenue. For COVID019, Health Warnings was designed to be used in partnership with our Community category, which includes lockdown and shelter-in-place mandates.
In this category we track:
Lockdown or shelter-in-place commencements
Key dates when restrictions are easing such as going from stage 3 to stage 2
When these restrictions end
Set up instant alerts for breaking Health Warnings
Health Warnings often have swift and significant impact on business demand. Knowing as soon as possible about relevant health issues gives your team the opportunity to respond accordingly. For example:
A fast food service can reduce their staffing and ingredients in preparation for a drop-off in orders as people stay home.
A grocery store or CPG producer can ensure they have enough essentials on hand for a surge in preparation buying.
Pharmacy chains can order in protective equipment or other products that will have high demand.
Hotel chains can prepare their teams to triage requests and update pricing and packaging to meet new conditions, as well as updating staff and stock requirements.
Ride sharing or bike hire companies can ensure they have properly briefed their ground teams on safety, and where appropriate ensure there are enough drivers or assets ready to help people get home safely.
You can set up alerts for key health warnings using our Notifications platform. You will be able to see these instantly in your PredictHQ Control Center, and choose either a daily or weekly digest email. You can set them up city wide, or set up Notifications specifically around each of your stores, hotels, key destinations or a particular address.
Use Health Warnings in Demand Forecasting
You can also use Health Warnings to inform your overall demand planning and improve your forecasting accuracy. Health Warnings, like other unscheduled event categories such as Severe Weather, Natural Disasters and Terrorist Attacks can not be calculated, but having historical data on how previous health issues impacted business demand can help teams make faster and smarter decisions when warnings are announced. PredictHQ is the market leader and one of the only single sources of truth when it comes to data depth of historical demand causal factors. As the pandemic reshapes demand and creates huge data deficits, our data enables you to understand how these events have impacted your business in the past to better adjust to the next normal. By correlating your anonymous, transactional data with previous issues such as epidemic warnings or shelter-in-place restrictions (both start and end dates) you can know exactly how these impact your business. This insight means your team can develop data-driven plans to respond as well as possible when future, similar events occur. Get in touch with our team to get access to Health Warnings.
