Emergency Response to COVID-19 in Canada: Platform Development and Implementation for eHealth in Crisis Management

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 coronavirus disease (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 The aim of this study is to develop an innovative web-based solution addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges of triaging, monitoring, and delivering nonhospital services unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods An adaptable crisis management digital platform was envisioned and designed with the goal of improving the system’s response on the basis of the literature; 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. Results The Crisis Management Platform was developed and offered to health authorities in Ontario on a nonprofit basis. It has the capability to dramatically streamline patient intake, triage, monitoring, referral, and delivery of nonhospital services. It decentralizes the provision of services (by moving them online) and centralizes data gathering and analysis, maximizing the use 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 constrained by human health risk resource 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 a public health crisis are key to evidence-driven oversight and management of public health emergencies.

Applications of e-Health to Support Person-Centered Health Care at the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic

“…17 Patient-centered web-based solutions containing data, virtual care, and the patient app were also found to be adequate to do evidence-based practice and manage COVID-19 pandemics. 29 Although the population's interest in the United States in telehealth was high, no association was identified between the population's interest and the proportion of hospitals that adopted telehealth. This may indicate that the population's need may not be satisfied by the existing telehealth facility, as the authors suggested.…”

The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Pandemic of Lockdown Loneliness and the Role of Digital Technology

“…A few examples of widely used online digital tools for social connection and networking include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeetings, and Google Hangouts [ 37 ]. These tools are being used in developed [ 38 ] and developing countries [ 39 ] and have become more acceptable and widely adopted during the current pandemic. In addition, these virtual technologies are increasingly being used for providing social and cognitive support, supporting learning and teaching, enabling buying and selling, facilitating leisure and hobbies, and doing collaborative innovative research that can be done at a distance.…”

Population-scale longitudinal mapping of COVID-19 symptoms, behaviour and testing

“…Studies in the US and Canada (CovidNearYou 10 , 11 ), UK (Covid Symptom Study 12 , 13 , also in US) and Israel (PredictCorona 14 ), have reported large cohorts of users drawn from the general population with a goal towards capturing information about COVID-19 along a variety of dimensions, from symptoms to behavior, and have demonstrated some ability to detect and predict the spread of disease 12 – 14 . This field has rapidly evolved since the beginning of the pandemic, with many analyses of these datasets focusing on COVID-19 diagnostics (i.e., symptoms, test results, medical background) 11 , care-seeking 15 , contact-tracing 16 , patient care 17 , effects on healthcare workers 18 , hospital attendance 19 , cancer 20 , primary care 21 , clinical symptoms 22 , and triage 23 . Here we perform a comprehensive analysis of a new source of COVID-19-related information spanning diagnostic and behavioral factors sampled from the general population during the beginning of the pandemic in the United States.…”