Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Mar 31, 2020
Date Accepted: May 12, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 15, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
E-Health in Crisis Management - Emergency Response to COVID-19 in Canada: Platform Development and Implementation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Public health emergencies like epidemics put enormous pressure on health care systems, while revealing deep structural and functional problems in the organization of care. The current COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this at a global level. The sudden increased demand on delivery systems puts unique pressures on pre-established care pathways. These extraordinary times require efficient tools for smart governance and resource allocation.
Objective:
To develop an innovative web-based solution addressing the seemingly unsurmountable challenges of triage, monitoring, and delivery of non-hospital services unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
Based on an existing shared health record platform and discussions between health care providers, decision-makers, academia, and the private sector in response to the COVID 19 epidemic, with the goal of improving the system’s response, an adaptable crisis management digital platform was envisioned and designed.
Results:
The Crisis Management Platform was developed and offered to health authorities in British Columbia on a non-profit basis. It has the capability to dramatically streamline patient intake, triage, monitoring, referral, and delivery of non-hospital services. It decentralizes provision of services (by moving them online), and centralizes data gathering and analysis, maximizing utilization of existing human resources, facilitating evidence-based decision-making, and minimizing the risk to both users and providers. It has unlimited scale-up possibilities (only con-strained by HHRR availability) with minimal marginal cost. Similar web-based solutions have the potential to fill an urgent gap in resource allocation, becoming a unique asset for health systems governance and management during critical times. They highlight the potential effectiveness of web-based solutions if built on an outcome-driven architecture.
Conclusions:
Data and web-based approaches in response to public health crisis are key to evidence-driven oversight and management of public health emergencies.
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