Innovative Solutions to Public Health Challenges in the USA and Canada

Being ready for the possibility of a world health disaster.After the 2003 SARS outbreak, both the federal and local governments of Canada admitted that their current IT and public health systems were not good enough. The Canadian government worked directly with IBM to create IBM Panorama, a method for monitoring and immunizing people against a wide range of diseases. In the end, this answer would be very important for the Canadian public health authorities to deal with COVID-19.

While this was going on, US public health officials continued to use paper-based methods, which were not able to keep up with how quickly COVID-19 was spreading

The steady-state approach to public health was mostly taken back in the years after the SARS outbreak. Most of the work that public health workers did every day involved common diseases, medicines, and illnesses.

During this time, Panorama helped the Canadian government with a number of public health tasks, such as investigating cases and managing outbreaks, as well as immunizations and keeping track of the vaccine supply.

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, health care groups got a lot of attention. All of a sudden, public health agencies had to deal with

Not the same disease that doesn't have any standards, like case definitions.

A disease that is always changing, with new types, signs, and ways to treat it.

To meet the need, more public health workers were hired, even though they didn't have enough training.

New ways to immunize include mixing doses with other vaccines and telling people about health risks by interpreting quickly changing data in ways that aren't clear.

At the time, both the US and Canada were facing big problems. However, the Canadian areas with Panorama were better prepared to handle the COVID-19 outbreak. They had a reliable enterprise-level system made just for public health, unlike many of their US rivals. This plan worked well for planning mass vaccinations and keeping an eye out for diseases.

Because of climate change and movement around the world, it's possible that another pandemic will happen soon, along with the problems listed above

This time, the US could learn from Canada's public health departments' work and how well they were prepared. In order to prepare for and react to a future pandemic, public health officials need to gather and organize important data, spend money on smart, powerful, and flexible data modernization systems, and make sure that workers have the right knowledge and skills.

First lesson: Use a data model made for public health.

The Canadian provinces set up a disease monitoring system based on a person-centered public health data model to gather the information that public health experts need to predict and spot new diseases and outbreaks. US public health groups would benefit from disease monitoring systems that use a well-known public health data model with useful language, links, and models.

Lesson 2: Use good facts to help you make important choices.

Every response to a public health problem is based on good facts. To protect the integrity of their data, US public health institutions should look for options that work with a variety of data formats and come with built-in ways to clean the data. People often have data silos when they can't share or get to their data, which leads to workarounds and lost data. It is very important to make plans for sharing info before an emergency.

To handle huge amounts of data, use system interaction

When COVID-19 was going around, public health officials in both Canada and the US gathered a huge amount of information. Emergency COVID-19 funds were used by US agencies to build new tools for case management and contact training. But these were usually one-time fixes that didn't get to the root causes of data being stored in silos or being missing or duplicated.

Canada set up integrated public health information systems, like Panorama, to make it easier to collect, clean, and handle data imports. This was the only accurate source of information for each resident's exposure, case analysis, contact tracing, outbreak management, and case management. It did this by using open APIs and other methods to add data to patient health records.

Setting up a cloud-native design is the fourth lesson. This will allow for elastic scaling.

A lot of the money that was spent on new technology during the COVID-19 outbreak is slowly being returned. For long-term efforts to work, public health agencies need to be able to expand their data and information systems so they can handle the large amounts of data that come up in both normal operations and emergency situations. By buying a cloud-native solution, the public health agency can be sure that the design is flexible and will work in the future. This will allow the agency to grow as needed.

Lesson 5: Give priority to agile setup so that you can adapt to changing illness states.

IBM Panorama helped Canadian public health workers keep track of more than 100 diseases and illnesses that needed to be reported. As soon as the new coronavirus was found in lab tests, it caused epidemiologists to code data in a Panorama parking lot until LOINC and SNOWMED publicly coded COVID-19. Systems that can be changed in this way are needed to be able to adapt to new diseases and situations, as opposed to systems that can only handle one disease or condition.