Graham Dufault, Director, Public Policy for the App Association https://www.ACTonline.org, presented written testimony “Enlisting Big Data in the Fight against Coronavirus” to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation https://commerce.senate.gov in April.
According to Graham Dufault, the App Association, the voice of small business technology entrepreneurs, representing about 5,000 small to mid-sized software and connected device companies across the globe, are on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19.
The members are creating portals to do big data analysis on patient risk factors and trends. Also, the Association’s “Connected Health Initiative” (CHI) is pushing for policy changes to enable the use of digital health tools to feed and leverage big data analytics.
He presented several key concepts on how big data can be used to combat the novel coronavirus. First experts are using big data to identify spread patterns and trends, using information to develop treatments and a vaccine, and using data to forecast resource needs.
In addition, the use of digital health and telehealth tools provides big data insights while helping patients and consumers manage and avoid chronic conditions. This underscores the need to make these tools along with healthcare data accessible to providers, consumers, and patients.
For example, GitHub and Johns Hopkins University created a dashboard of coronavirus infection data, with data pulled from a wide variety of public and private sources which has yielded important insights into the spread of the virus.
Data was obtained by looking at foreign language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations. The data was used by Kinsa Health to utilize temperature data from their smart thermometers to reveal valuable insights on infection patterns.
Kinsa adapted an analytics tool to detect instance of atypical fever which is a characteristic of the COVID-19 infection. Kinsa then developed the U.S. Health Weather Map enabling the data to show how effective stay-at-home orders can be in immediately stemming the infection rate. The map shows how effectively the use of big data can be to help public health officials, providers, and the general public better understand how a fast evolving global pandemic occurs.
The testimony presented suggests that clinical decision support and screening tools are currently helping healthcare systems triage patients who are less likely to need immediate care so that resources can be directed to those patients most in need. This function is critical during a crisis, when resources must focus on patients presenting the highest risks, while closely monitoring relatively lower risk patients remotely.
Also, live video and telephonic visits are a necessity since valuable reliable data is available. However, it should be up to the patient to determine what is collected and how the data is used. The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing how valuable the use of end-to-end encrypted tools like FaceTime can be since conversations are shielded from anyone besides the physician and patient in the healthcare setting.