Materials

Group 74

Dashboards

Tools

This page is devoted to health information tools and digital solutions used to detect, prevent, and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This page is dedicated to health information tools and digital solutions used to detect, prevent, and respond to various health challenges.. These tools are designed to empower individuals and healthcare professionals, enabling them to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions for health and well-being.

PHIN SUPPORT AGAINST COVID-19

Stay informed and connected

Effective outbreak management requires not only adopting the digital technology of choice, but to ensure there are enabling policies to adopt these tools within the healthcare system. Digital solutions, without its ability to generate meaningful information, has limited value. Data collected by digital tools are also needed to generate epidemiological insights and create models that can predict the future course of the pandemic.

With ongoing guidance from WHO, PHIN support its members in their response to COVID-19 through knowledge sharing, capacity building and expert advisories. This page is devoted to the health information tools and digital solutions being used to detect, prevent and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we highlight the WHO guidelines and the various digital solutions adopted by Pacific countries and territories in their response to protect their countries from the pandemic. With the rapid increase in the number of digital technologies, the decision on what and why to invest are often not clear cut.

The Technical Resources section includes access to free technical resources such as dashboards, webinars, online-courses, publications, tools and guidelines on COVID-19. PHIN members are always encouraged to actively share their knowledge and experience to raise awareness, increase confidence in adoption, and to ensure digital technologies can meet the countries’ needs during this extraordinary times.

FEATURED MATERIALS

COVID-19 DASHBOARDS:
CURRENT SITUATION OF THE PANDEMIC

The need to track COVID-19 has fueled the innovation of data visualization dashboards that visually display disease burden. WHO and The Johns Hopkins University (MD, USA) dashboards provide up-to-date visuals of COVID-19 cases and deaths around the globe

WHO Coronavirus Disease

COVID-19 Situation in WHO - Western Pacific Region

COVID19 on the outbreak in the Western Pacific

COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins

WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard

DIGITAL TOOLS

Strong health information systems enable people to test, diagnose, quarantine and manage cases. It also allows the exchange of information with other medical providers, analyze the data and rapidly share the results of those analyses — all essential steps to create an effective pandemic response. Health information systems, along with harmonized information achieved through standards, are the combined multiplier effect of a national diagnostic network, laboratory systems, supply chains and surveillance mechanisms all working together.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many digital tools have been developed to assist with contact tracing and case identification. These tools include outbreak response, proximity tracking and symptom tracking tools, which can be combined as a suite of integrated tools or used as stand-alone tools. Several existing digital health applications allow countries to quickly capture and analyze testing data, to act on positive cases and to implement strategies to prevent community spread – including contact tracing. This works best if the solution architecture is flexible so that COVID-19 or other emerging communicable disease modules such as leptospirosis and dengue can be incorporated, populated and the data shared to provide a multi-purpose surveillance solution.

If there is one important global learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, countries need to always be prepared for another pandemic and continually invest in strengthening their digital surveillance of diseases and outbreak response capacity.

OUTBREAK RESPONSE TOOLS FOR MANAGING CASES AND THEIR CONTACTS

Outbreak response tools are designed for public health response personnel involved in contact tracing activities and outbreak investigations. They encompass the management of complex relationships between suspected cases and their contacts through the electronic data entry of case and contact information. Outbreak response tools can be used to facilitate all aspects of contact tracing, including case investigation, listing and monitoring of contacts, automating analysis, and performance monitoring.

Because a person may be linked to multiple cases, or that person may become a confirmed case that have links to other contacts, automated outbreak response tools are needed to manage the continuous and dynamic relationships between cases and contacts. Outbreak response tools should reflect the workflows in field doing the contact tracing as well as providing supervisors to monitor its implementation.

VACCINATION DATA MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Vaccine Delivery, Data Management and Electronic Immunization Information Systems

SYMPTOM TRACKING TOOLS

Symptom tracking applications designed to routinely collect self-reported signs and symptoms. Most of applications are app-based daily self-reporting tools for smart-phone users.

PROXIMITY TRACING TOOLS

Proximity tracking tools, use location-based (GPS) or Bluetooth technology to find and trace the movements of individuals to identify people who may have been exposed to an infected person. The risk of exposure to COVID-19 depends on the probability of coming into close
(less than 1 metre) or frequent contact with people who may be infected.

This would ultimately allow the phone of a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19 to anonymously make users aware they have been in close proximity to that patient. The second is the use of location services in contact tracing software applications.

HEALTH IDENTIFICATION AND BIOMETRICS

COVID-19: Simprints Contactless Biometrics

Simprints´ biometric solution solves this challenge in the context of contact tracing, testing and case management for COVID-19. From testing to discharge, suspected cases require multiple touch points with the health system and resources need to be carefully prioritized among confirmed cases. Without a unique identifier, time may be wasted searching for patient records, patients may fail to receive their test results, and lives may be lost from compromised quality of care.

 

Simprints’ contactless biometric identification enables accurate enrollment and identification of patients. This can facilitate high quality data collection on the number of new and suspected cases and can be rapidly deployed and scaled on low cost Android devices.

 

Workflow is designed on WHO (FFX) Protocols for contact tracing and case management and is interoperable with all major open source data collection platforms such as CommCare,
Open SRP or IS2.

LEARNING AND VIRTUAL HEALTH ASSISTANTS

WHO Academy: COVID-19 Learning

This app provides health workers everywhere with an efficient way to access the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 knowledge resources all in one place, including up-to-the-minute guidance, tools, training, self-paced learning, and virtual workshops to support health workers in caring for patients infected by COVID-19 – as well on how they can protect themselves as they do their critical work. Includes access to WHO’s rapidly expanding and evolving training materials and guidance, along with opportunities to participate in virtual skills workshops and other live training. FUNCTIONALITY: Reference Comprehensive management. Questionnaires and tests, Health service relationship, geolocation, prevention, quarantine management, state credentials.

COVID-19: HealthBot Framework

Conversational AI for Healthcare

• Hospitals and Medical Call centers cannot cope with all the questions from citizens
• Hospitals are looking for ways to enable Triage and handover to Telehealth
• Hospitals do not have insights in regards of who, where and how many people have questions

 

The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is a cloud service that empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots that can be used to enhance their processes, self-service, and cost reduction efforts.

 

The chatbot guides users through self-assessment and connects them to additional resources and medical professionals if the patient has been determined to be at risk.

 

Built-in healthcare intelligence: The Healthcare Bot comes with built-in healthcare AI services, including a symptom checker and medical content from known industry resources, and language understanding models that are tuned to understand medical and clinical terminology.

ADDITIONAL COVID-19 RESOURSES

All technical guidance on COVID-19

WHO Pacific COVID-19 updates

CDC: Coronavirus (COVID-19)

SPC COVID-19: Pacific Community Updates