Dealing with the Epidemics of the Future... #100daysforepidemicpreparedness

Not surprisingly, much has been written about Epidemic Preparedness since Covid-19. It remains on top of every geopolitical agenda across the alphabet soup of geo-strategic and economic blocks around the world.

However, most of it stems from a supply chain, provisioning, and systemic adequacy perspective; and mostly has the wisdom of hindsight.

The thing that we can be certain of, is that Covid-19, will not be the last of these challenges. It is likely that we shall see such threats emerge out of nowhere and at a frequency which is higher than in the past; and perhaps more virulent. The scale and speed of their transmission will only rise in an ever-globalising environment; and threaten economic sustainability and long term health of the citizens of the world.

Knowing that much research has gone into weaponising biotechnology; and this continues to be pursued outside the line of civilian oversight,this current post-facto approach; is like driving a car forward while looking into the rearview mirror.

Humankind will not have the luxury to deal with epidemics with full lockdowns in future, if we wish to develop the capability to minimise the disruptive potential of epidemics.

The ability of health systems to spot threats early, going forward assumes criticality. This means health systems need to go beyond looking at public health data or events with a conformity lens ie. matching things with what we already know.

We now need to bring pre-emptive capability to public health, ie. be able to spot non-conforming information early, localise and contain the occurrence, analyse and respond to it swiftly and decisively. The economy of effort and damage that can prevent an overwhelm of systems is only viable by such an approach.?Taking a leaf out of early-warning systems that the world has developed for defence systems and disasters like Tsunami’s are the way to go.

What would it take to develop these capabilities? In a single word – DATA.

Ensuring the flow of near-real-time-data into Health Records and Data Lakes is fortunately now easier, than it has ever been in human history. Technologies like Elastic Clouds, MicroServices and so on can make sure that Data from the Clinics, Point-of-care devices and Labs can be gathered using available systems and can ride public information highways for analysis. Not only that these systems can deal with a wider and complex range of data including images / pictures, sounds and so on from an increasingly diverse set of sources. Speed in networks, devices, computing power and innovations at the front end, will only add an exponential dimension to this possibility.

The true potential of the much talked about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies will come to bear on healthcare only thence. Regardless of the hype that investor communities weave around artificial intelligence, we are barely scratching the surface; until we equip our healthcare systems to generate and funnel data in near real time.

#100daysforepidemicpreparedness #digitalhealth #healthsystems #healthcare