A computer program created by professionals from the Lanzarote Health Area Management of Health Services, attached to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, has received the Accésit Award for communications of outstanding innovative experience within the framework of the II Virtual Ibero-American Conference on Covid-19 and Public Health.
The video, entitled 'Digital tool for managing and processing data of covid-19 cases', was presented at the conference by Nursing and IT staff Yanira Alonso, Baltasar Gómez and César Caraballo. This is a work on information systems and epidemiological surveillance, which tries to improve the response capacity of health services to the pandemic situation.
This tool arises at the beginning of the pandemic due to the need to obtain the most complete information possible about patients positive for SARS-Cov 2 and to be able to access it in a single screen display.
With that objective, the IT technician César Caraballo developed a program that imports as much information as possible from the patient's clinical history, from sociodemographic data, laboratory PCR tests, hospitalization dates, ICU admission, discharges, etc. The program also allows the tracker to enter other data manually, such as those concerning close contacts, profession, entity to which it belongs (whether it is a workplace, residence or day center), as well as data on vaccination and symptoms.
The application has been very useful for the visualization and location of coronavirus outbreaks that arose during the acute phase of the pandemic, as well as to obtain in a single list the results of a group of users or workers of the same entity. Likewise, in the screenings of hundreds of people, it allowed to obtain a list with positives and negatives identified by name, ID and clinical history number in an editable table.
According to those responsible, this tool could be extended to the processes of other diseases such as tuberculosis to manage outbreaks and close contacts originated, in addition to the screenings that are carried out for food poisoning, since it would allow to have all the data and microbiology results.
The manager of the Lanzarote Health Services, José Luis Aparicio, welcomes the work developed by this team and their participation in a conference that promotes collaboration in research and scientific knowledge among professionals.
Virtual Ibero-American Conference on covid-19 and Public Health
The second edition of the Ibero-American Conference brought together more than 500 professionals telematically under the motto 'Improving the response capacity of health systems to new challenges'.
The initiative was organized by the Andalusian School of Public Health together with the Ibero-American Ministerial Network for Learning Research in Health (Rimais), with the collaboration of the Carlos III Health Institute, the Ibero-American General Secretariat and the Training Center of the Spanish Cooperation in Montevideo.
