How Technology is Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic
Kathy Ormsby, CPC, CPCO
Vice President of Compliance and Analytics
The Office of Science and Technology Policy released an article on March 16, 2020, titled a “Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-10 Data Set”. The article is in part a call to action to the nation’s artificial intelligence community to develop new text and data mining techniques that help the community answer high-priority scientific questions related to the virus.
Dr. Cori Bargmann, Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, reiterated how important it is for medical communities to share information and rely on data, “Sharing vital information across scientific and medical communities is key to accelerating our ability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic”. “The new COVID-19 Open Research Dataset will help researchers worldwide to access important information faster”, she said.
As of April 6, 2020, the coronavirus has infected over 1,323,400 people across the globe. Because of social distancing and the economic impact of the virus, absolutely everyone has been affected. While all of this is happening, technology companies are getting involved in leveraging clinical data and other healthcare data to combat and positively impact the coronavirus statistics. Many high-tech companies are already using clinical data to analyze and forecast outcomes and financial impacts as well as predictive modeling to better manage specific populations.
The software platform created by the data scientists at qrcAnalytics, Inc. has the ability to analyze the comorbidities attributing to poor outcomes relating to the coronavirus. Identification of these high-risk patients helps in identifying possible admissions and can contribute to the estimation of the number of potentially needed hospital beds, ICU capacity and ventilators. The information generated by the qrcAnalytics platform can be used for outreach campaigns for the most vulnerable populations with reminders of precautions to avoid getting the virus. Healthcare can use this information to be better prepared and possibly slow the spread and most importantly, improve outcomes.
While some states call for shelter-in-place orders, others are calling their directives stay-at-home orders. In all cases, people are to avoid all nonessential outings and stay inside as much as possible. This order can be particularly challenging for those that already battle with depression and other mental illness Mental health providers can use the data to prioritize the highest risk patients within their population and arrange for needed telehealth therapy. Using this data to manage this high-risk population can help improve the quality of these patients’ lives as we get through the stay-at-home orders implemented across most of the United States.
COVID-19 is a global crisis, the decisions we make over the next couple of weeks will shape our world. The availability of accurate data in the fight against this disease will give insight into prevention, population health management, and the spread of disease. The right information and the right data, in the right hands, can and will make all a significant difference. qrcAnalytics stands ready to provide the described data analysis service at no charge to any interested healthcare provider; please contact us at info@qrc-analytics.com.
