Addressing the Covid‐19 pandemic and future public health challenges through global collaboration and a data‐driven systems approach

Abstract

Covid‐19 has already taught us that the greatest public health challenges of our generation will show no respect for national boundaries, will impact lives and health of people of all nations, and will affect economies and quality of life in unprecedented ways. The types of rapid learning envisioned to address Covid‐19 and future public health crises require a systems approach that enables sharing of data and lessons learned at scale. Agreement on a systems approach augmented by technology and standards will be foundational to making such learning meaningful and to ensuring its scientific integrity. With this purpose in mind, a group of individuals from Spain, Italy, and the United States have formed a transatlantic collaboration, with the aim of generating a proposed comprehensive standards‐based systems approach and data‐driven framework for collection, management, and analysis of high‐quality data. This framework will inform decisions in managing clinical responses and social measures to overcome the Covid‐19 global pandemic and to prepare for future public health crises. We first argue that standardized data of the type now common in global regulated clinical research is the essential fuel that will power a global system for addressing (and preventing) current and future pandemics. We then present a blueprint for a system that will put these data to use in driving a range of key decisions. In the context of this system, we describe and categorize the specific types of data the system will require for different purposes and document the standards currently in use for each of these categories in the three nations participating in this work. In so doing, we anticipate some of the challenges to harmonizing these data but also suggest opportunities for further global standardization and harmonization. While we have scaled this transnational effort to three nations, we hope to stimulate an international dialogue with a culmination of realizing such a system.

Toward an Agile System: Iranian Information System for Covid-19-Affected Patients Data Collection from Iranian Hospitals

“…With COVID-19 outbreak, countries need to adopt a broad and long-term vision to improve data systems to help manage information about the pandemic. A wholegovernment, multi-sectoral approach is required to use the outbreak data to manage consumer supplies, hospital beds, sharing of resources among healthcare provider centers and deployment of healthcare workers [11]. This article aims to introduce the live system that is utilized in Iran for data gathering from hospitals.…”

The Quest for System-Theoretical Medicine in the COVID-19 Era

“…Smart health care delivery can lower thresholds for access and improve acceptance of the targeted population. In case of in-patient treatment units also a human-centered management structure and style, e.g., “systemic management concepts,” could prevent burn-out of the staff and could enhance success of public health goals ( 6 , 7 , 10 ). Later on, we sketch those issues focusing on somatic processes but being aware of environmental factors as contexts.…”

A learning approach to community response during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Applying the Cynefin framework to guide decision‐making

“…For example, the lack of national coordination of apps for contact tracing for COVID-19 has been identified as a limitation of local technology-driven strategies. 15,16 There has also been a call for purposeful creation of coordinated data collection systems and national and global data standards that encourage a shift from "relative sick care to proactive management of health". 17,18 Finally, over time there will be a need to overhaul our current medical data infrastructure, including antiquated and inflexible electronic health records that do not easily facilitate data extraction and sharing.…”