War-room secrets of other countries that India can implement to tackle the current mayhem
War-room secrets of other countries that India can implement to tackle the current mayhem
The
importance of data-driven insights in strategic and operational decision-making
remains crucial in mounting the fight against the novel coronavirus. A
centralised war-room or command centre has proven to be crucial at the time of
any crisis as it helps to streamline the capacity and efficiency of the response team while providing
real-time data visualisation of key performance metrics across the healthcare
network. This includes data pertaining to
availability of beds, drugs, and consumables, supply of medical oxygen, and
infection spread-related statistics in a particular area for both government
and private hospitals.
As
India grapples with the second wave of Covid-19, several districts and cities
have set up war-rooms, which are addressing the various concerns of the
citizens related to the pandemic. A war-room generally features large
dashboards, geographic
information system (GIS)-mapped data for facilities connected and patients and monitors, which help healthcare administrators to
review the performance of cities or districts at the central level and it
remains a single point of all data, IT, and coordination for a city or
district-level overview. Also,
the capablity of a war-room solution needs to have predictability and
forecasting models. In fact, predictive analytics has a crucial role to play
for making informed decisions in a war-room. It needs to have connected
facilities withe real-time data across the healthcare network. It also involves
integration with other disaster management processes like ambulance movement,
traffic and weather, to list a few. There is also need for dissemination of
real-time data flowing into a war-room while patients being moved or
transferred to a healthcare facility. Multi-disciplinary teams across domain
specialties, including clinical and non-clinical, can be present in a war-room
for quick decisions, and the war-room module highlights where they need to put
more attention or resources. There is also scope for integrated audio-video
consultation in a war-room. A war-room module capablity needs to highlight to
Covid task force team where they need to put more attention or divert
resources.
To
add more power to the efforts being undertaken in these war-rooms, India can
look at examples of various Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore,
Taiwan, or South Korea who have long back set up command centers, similar to
air traffic control systems, to manage care in much more effective and
efficient ways.
Also,
in the case of India, while the country had developed the Aarogya Setu App in order to help with
the contact-tracing of individuals suffering from Covid-19, it leaves scope for
improvement for technical details like identifying something like a Covid-19
hotspot for that matter.
Need
for strong early alert frameworks
In
fighting the spread of the novel coronavirus, data and science form the most
critical elements of decision-making. However, the void of reliable real-time
information has been a global challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A
few of the Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea,
however, have been instrumental in deploying effective disease outbreak early
alert systems. Many of the health crises have been identified and mitigated
with the adoption of preventative measures, including airport and port of entry
screening, temperature checks, and convincing the public to wear masks.
Building a system for defence against the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in the
case of new strains or mutants of viruses, requires an outermost perimeter that
serves the purpose of an early alert system. Deploying an early alert system
would also require cooperation from an empowered task force (ETF) comprising
virologists, scientists, and epidemiologists.
Enabling
effective contact tracing
Contact
tracing relates to a process by which every newly discovered infected case or
individual is mapped on to all the persons that might have been potentially
infected by him or her. In the case of Singapore which had effectively deployed
contract tracing, in a span of 24 hours of each new infection being discovered,
a team of 100 contact tracers working 24x7 put together the contact map for
that person, which estimates the nature and extent of contact between that
particular individual and people who came in contact with them.
The
ministry of health in Singapore considers data from multiple formats and
sources to track the movement of a possibly infected individual and determine
their contagion footprint. Such real-time data feeds, including multimedia data
streams, are then combined with a tracking mechanism developed by a technical
agency of the government. A contact-tracing smartphone app also helps to
identify individuals that have been within two metres of a patient for at least
30 minutes for follow-up action by contact tracers. Such highly developed
digital capabilities of the nation given a shot in the arm to the capabilities
of the administration.
Similarly,
since the SARS epidemic of 2003, Taiwan has been in a state of constant
readiness to combat any form of epidemics, which helps it to move swiftly to
contain the fallout and undertake efforts towards appropriate resource
allocations to its healthcare system.
On
their part, Taiwanese authorities started collating data from two disparate
sources: the immigration and customs
database and the national insurance database. The idea was to create a unified
big data platform for analytics. They were successfully able to identify cases
based on clinical visits, travel history, and symptom patterns and thus were
able to provide real-time alerts to targeted population segments about possible
infected individuals.
These
countries have ramped up their capabilities through effective communication
techniques, rapid dissemination of information, the ability to recognize
emerging patterns and act swiftly.
Adoption
of privacy-preserving technologies
While
several technological tools could be deployed to help control a public health
crisis, those tools are only beneficial provided the technologies could both be
trusted and readily deployable. A major concern has been that there has been a
general lack of reliable, real-time threat information sharing, contact
tracing, and community prevalence data during this pandemic has meant people
and public health authorities have been mostly relying on backward-looking
reporting of confirmed cases, which has hampered the fight against Covid-19
severely. Such type of reporting has led to various issues, including
persistent testing bottlenecks, false-positive tests, the asymptomatic nature
of many cases, and lags in reporting testing outcomes, which have proved to be
a roadblock in mounting an effective and trusted response against the health
crisis. The lack of ubiquitous trusted technologies in the hands of citizens
confounded real-time risk-reward decision-making at the household level.
It
is also a known fact that a large-scale deployment of an information network
would carry the risks of cyber-attacks. These risks could be akin to those
faced by financial systems, public transportation systems, or the power grid.
Robust protections are required, both for the physical security of the
information processing network as well as the privacy of individuals from
overreach by commercial entities and administrators. These information networks
can be made considerably less vulnerable by building in resiliency and
redundancy and highly distributed processing capabilities.
Also,
it needs to be kept in mind that any epidemic preparedness starts years before
an outbreak. A densely-populated nation like India needs to remain prepared to
effectively ward off a health crisis considering that this is not going to be a
one-off situation.
