Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Case Tracking System for COVID-19: Development Study (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED 2019 novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), which presumably originated in bats and transmitted to humans through unknown mechanisms in Wuhan, Hubei province, China in December 2019, has affected more than 180 countries and territories around the world. On March 11, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) characterized the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. This is the first pandemic known to be caused by a new coronavirus. While the complete clinical picture with regard to COVID-19 is not fully known, based on currently available information, older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions might be at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19. The emergence and rapid widespread of COVID-19 are not only becoming a new public health crisis, but also wreaking havoc on the global economy and industries. However, disease investigation, patient-tracking mechanisms and the transmission of case reports seem to both labor-intensive and slow. The ongoing pandemic is putting healthcare systems under strain worldwide and forcing hospitals and other medical facilities to scramble to make sure data can be shared effectively. The primary aim of this study is to design a Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Case Tracking system capable of facilitating detection and control of COVID-19 transmission. A blockchain-based architecture is built to protect the security and guarantee the correctness of International Patient Summary (IPS). An International Patient Summary (IPS) document is an electronic health record extract containing essential healthcare information about a subject of care[1]. IPS is designed for supporting the use case scenario for ‘unplanned, cross border care’, but it is not limited to it. It is intended to be international, i.e., to provide generic solutions for global application beyond a particular region or country and the IPS dataset is minimal and non-exhaustive; specialty-agnostic and condition-independent; but still clinically relevant. The design, global scope, and utility of IPS towards unplanned cross border care, potential for re-use makes it suitable to be considered for a situation like COVID-19. A Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) confirmed IPS, including symptoms, therapies, medications, laboratory data, can be transferred and exchanged on the platform for ease of access by the physicians efficiently. Patient data are de-identified to protect privacy. Members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) around the countries will be able to carry out risk control and track high-risk groups using tracking module in the system. The results of this study help support the global infectious disease prevention and protection by exchanging and sharing case data which can speed up the clinical research of COVID-19 and expedite the efforts towards developing treatment protocols. Launching an integral system assembled with disease surveillance and case tracking modules on the Internet might help the international medical community to detect and respond to the situation of accelerated virus transmission thereby lifting constraints on COVID-19 research.