Monitor Pandemics

Create a pandemic infection motorization platform to show the impact on the hospital's activity and monitor all interventions performed, as well as to be able to predict its evolution

Fernando Araujo (CEO), Maria João Campos and Afonso Pedrosa 

Difficulty in perceiving the impact of the pandemic on the hospital's activity, from the necessary monitoring in the emergency, inpatient or outpatient areas. Understand whether the interventions defined to control the problem as screenings are being effective. Be able to predict the evolution of the pandemic in the organization a few days in advance in order to allow time for the preparation of the care offer.

The population that benefits from this tool ranges from the top management to the various workers in the organization who can thus monitor in real time what is happening and can prepare for all the following scenarios.
In each monitoring area, workers define their indicators that reflect the main activity of their service or area of activity. As the monitoring indicators are developed, they are validated by each group of workers.

We intend to collaborate for the public good by making available data sets of  disease caused by the pandemic

In addition to the internal impact on pandemic management at the level of top management and clinical management, we intend to facilitate the work of researchers who study the impact of the pandemic through disclosure of open data sets.

We intend to scale this solution through new partners such as other hospitals in Portugal or other  countries . In this way we can help several other health institutions to better organize themselves to fight each pandemic through the availability of this tool .

The tool built aims to present data on the reality of each pandemic to each institution. In a pandemic context, the most important part is being able to anticipate the scenarios of what will happen so that each organization can prepare for an eventual increase in demand and thus prevent catastrophe scenarios.
Within each institution, the percentage of users of the institution using the solution (15% in our hospital) is a good indicator of the importance and success of the tool, since in this type of context the tools are only used if strictly necessary.
On the other hand, the number of patients remotely monitored is another indicator of the tool's success .

The barriers that may limit the impact in the coming years will be cost, technological or training.
In our country, barriers will only be of cost. Here we intend to resolve this issue by obtaining public or private financing.
In the other countries that we can plan to implement, there are also technological barriers, since sometimes there may not be necessary technological structures such as data integration problems. Regarding training problems, we will try to resolve this issue by ensuring adequate training for the local resources that will manage the tool. With regard to costs, we will try to have public or private funding to implement them.

Ministry of Health,

Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto

The barriers that this challenge allows us to overcome, are the inability to adapt quickly to the exponential increase in healthcare in a pandemic context and to be able to anticipate the evolution of the pandemic inside the health care facility. On the other hand, we find it difficult to remotely monitor our patients when they are at home.

We would like to collaborate with partners related to health (other hospitals), scientific (public health) and technological partners. We have no specific names in mind.