CoviData

CoviData illustration
regional information about nearby institutes
Stock management for an institute

The Problem

There are almost 33 000 health institutes in France, either public or private, and they do not possess any unified system or automatic protocol to share and track medical supply levels between them or nationwide. As expected, this results in an inefficient use of scarce resources. For example, we encountered the case of an hospital that had extra ICU ventillators (which are critical in this sanitary crisis) but did not know where to send them. Some institutions also received too many face shields until not being able to store them and having to destroy them. Moreover it requires a gigantic amount of time for health care teams to synchronise these data. For instance, the tracking of ICU beds (and only ICU) in Paris' region requires a whole team to manually call each of the 255 institutes every 4 hours. This time could be used to perform actual health assistance instead.

To summarize the problem, we have no regional or national vision of stocks (such as protection equipment, desinfectants, ...), which would howevbe extremly needed by health authorities moreover, collected data are not used efficiently for example to prevent shortages

Our solution

We deployed a secured, web platform at https://covid-data.eu. This plateform allows health institutes to keep track of the medical supplies that they have. With their account, institutions can follow the evolution of their stock not only in the past, but thanks to an AI also in the future. This algorithm is evaluating the possible consumption of ressources a few days ahead in the future and sending an alert when a possible shortage appears. Moreover they can access a real time map to know the situation of their neighbors and conact them to settle optimal transfers of ressources (for example transfering facial masks).

The website is online since March the 23th in French and in English, it has been developped with a python django backend and a React application so you just need a Web Browser and an internet connection to use the tool. The server is hosted by AWS service, in order to prevent any security issue and ability to deal with an high number of connections.

The platform has been designed to be very modular, so adding new ressources to track or translate the website to new languages can be done quickly.

The week-end

We are currently in discussions with french health autorities to widen the use of the platform. We consider this weekend as an opportunity to get a better understanding of the needs of health systems of other european countries. We found out that thee challenge we address is commun to several countries in the EU where the same exact coordination problem arise. We hope that the discussions that started this week-end will continue and lead to the deployment of the platform at european scale, in order to save lives.

Impact of the solution on the crisis

Sun Tzu said about wars that "The line between disorder and order lies in logistics", CoviData is the way to stand on the right side of this line.

Thus, during this pandemic as we all have seen, it is critical to lower the pressure on health systems, by giving them access to the supply that they need, when they need it without adding time consuming procedures. The constraint is thus to increase healtcare capacity with an almost fixed number of human ressources,

Therefore the only possible solution is to optimize the ressources available at local, national and maybe european scale, this is exaclty the point that CoviData allows.

More generally, to lift the lockdowns during the next weeks and moths, it will be essential to have a secured way of collecting data (of such diverse sources as protective masks in a given pharmacy or even results of serological tests performed in a small countryside medical test laboratory) storing this data securrly and giving access to this database to health authorities in order to give real-time information to decision-makers.

The need to go on with the project

Accuracy of the predictions and benefits of using the solution relies on how much data we can gather. The key element here is to have as much as possible of institutes and authorities willing to declare data with the immediate advantage for them to benefit from the national visualisation tool and the predictive algorithms.

Thus a political and institutionnal support is mandatory for the project to reach its full potential not only at each nation scale but also at the level of the European Union. We indeed believe that the only way to tackle this crisis and those to come, is to increase the tools that allows optimal coordination in beetween European nations

The value of the solution after the crisis

Medical ressources logistic is not only a pandemic issue but a way to optimize healtcare systems even in normal time.

Even if the use of the solution is totally open source and free for health institutions during the COVID-19 crisis, we are thinking about developping a commercial and technical support for the solution after the crisis based on a freemium model. We are also working toinclude into the platform a market place where health institutions will be able to contact "validated" supply producers and directly order supplies from them in a fast and secured way. This might be a huge step toward the emergence of a safe and clear european ecosystem for health supply which as the ongoing COVID crisis highlighted is critical for each of our respective countries