The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus in the world has created a new set of challenges for public health officials. A large number of investigations undertaken by public health officials, including the World Health Organization (WHO), have identified opportunities to improve management systems to reduce risk in the future. One such opportunity is the role of convergence technology and the private sector, which can be an important partner to strengthen outbreak preparedness and response.
Communication: Public health interventions require constant communication with the relevant populations in order to be effective. Without a means to communicate, efforts may never reach those in need, or may not be received by the right audience. In fighting with the epidemic, the use of mobile phones has been a vital technology that many organizations have used for informational campaigns.
Vaccine Development: Through innovation, technology, and partnership, the pace of new vaccine development is accelerating. To ensure the public health of all, the benefits of innovation must be shared globally and technology used to improve access to vaccines on a global scale.
Educational content: Educational content is developed to increase the expertise of medical personnel at all levels, assure correct infection prevention and control practices, and deliver consistent information that can be tailored and tested with health workers in the field. New, innovative technology allows for online testing and evaluation of key training competencies by health care professionals without requiring a global network infrastructure.
Consult with remote areas: Satellites, cell phones, and internet connectivity provided in remote areas can be used to coordinate teams of doctors and scientists throughout the world to work together in fighting against the virus. Google Maps are used to track infection rates on a local level, while servers are used to store and share data between locations.
Medical Expertise: Technology can be an important complement to medical expertise. This is especially true when working with local populations, as many of the training and outreach efforts would rely on local individuals. In addition, technology offers a means of reaching large numbers of people with minimal resources.
Real-time data Collection: Because of the potential for real-time data collection, telemedicine can allow us to target priority areas with medicines and health supplies. At the same time, it allows health workers to access up-to-date information and provide better patient care – in turn reducing the risk of an outbreak reaching epidemic levels. Increasingly, even more, powerful digital tools are now coming to market that will give aid agencies a fast, efficient way to inform populations and facilitate response during epidemics and public health emergencies.
Effective healthcare system: Start-ups will become important for providing innovation and efficiency to the healthcare system. This will create a win-win situation between the public health sector and start-ups, particularly with respect to developing new diagnostics tests, medicines, preventive care strategies and other areas that are not adequately addressed by the current healthcare system.
Data analysis: Data analysis has played a crucial role in threats associated with epidemics. For instance, after the covid-19 outbreak, risk maps were generated based on data from earlier outbreaks. This helps in identifying behavior patterns of infected persons and tracking those in epidemic affected areas for potential infection. This technology is being extensively used by the countries to monitor the potential epidemic and ensuring compliance with regulations.
Early warning Platform: There is no single organisation that can beat this virus alone. Solving this crisis will require a highly coordinated and well-informed response – not just from governments, but also from private sector companies as well as citizens. Some private sector companies like BlueDot, has been instrumental in building an early warning platform that can detect the most effective public health interventions and deliver them to countries and populations with greatest need.
Forecast: The widespread transmission of infectious diseases demands that governments collect data in real-time to forecast patterns of infection and predict where the next person will get sick. Many technology firms across the world help governments by providing mass surveillance systems based on facial recognition technologies, sensing technologies to identify those with fever in public places and data from mobile phone companies to trace the people who might be infected, and limit the spread of the disease.
