How to fight epidemics with digital tools
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how crucial the availability of accurate information is for large-scale, real-time disease monitoring and management. In a recent post at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Professor Stefan Feuerriegel and doctoral candidate Joel Persson of the Chair of Information Management Systems at D-MTEC argue for increased investment in digital technology in order to better manage the current and future pandemics.
Offline disease monitoring
Most countries, including highly developed ones such as Switzerland, Germany and the United States, still rely on legacy tools for disease monitoring: data are exchanged offline via telephone, fax or post. The disadvantages of such exchanges are obvious: reporting delays, information lost due to illegible documents, and inaccurate tallies, sometimes arrived at by weighing stacks of faxes. To take informed action during a pandemic, however, decision-makers need accurate real-time information: How many cases are confirmed per day and region? What is the occupancy rate of critical-care beds? And how are people responding to policy measures aimed at social distancing?
Countries such as Singapore, on the other hand, have rolled out mobile apps that alert people when they have been in the vicinity of infected individuals. The data from these apps is directly integrated into monitoring tools and immediately made available to public decision-makers.
Seven steps toward effective management
Feuerriegel and Persson suggest seven steps that governments can take in the area of digital technology to support the more effective management of this and future pandemics. Digital technology must be made a top priority. Integrated data solutions should support a holistic approach to data collection and evaluation; here publicly available dashboards have become best practice. A lean approach, starting with a minimal working product and incrementally adding new features, is the quickest way to improve technologies currently in use. While the authors insist that privacy must be protected, they note that encrypted data allow for better protection than do handwritten notes and faxes. New data sources should be integrated into current systems; telecommunications data, for example, can be useful for monitoring social distancing and forecasting the future spread of infection. Meanwhile, communicating evidence-based impact assessments made possible by digital technology can help governments gain the trust of the public.
Finally, decision-makers need to act now to invest in new technologies, even as the numbers are flattening in many countries. It would be a mistake to wait until the next pandemic comes along and be caught out unprepared.
The full post in the World Economic Forum is available external page here
About the authors
Professor Stefan Feuerriegel holds the Chair of Management Information Systems at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich. He advises the SDG Financing Lab of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is a member of the COVID-19 Working Group of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Joel Persson is a research assistant and doctoral student at the Chair of Management Information Systems at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on causal inference, statistical machine learning, data-driven decision-making and policy evaluation, and applications in marketing and healthcare.