Emerge and Penta Network Support Public COVID-19 Response with Civitas
All over the world, countries are dealing with overburdened, resource-constrained, and highly fragmented public healthcare systems. The huge number of COVID-19 cases seen over the past few months has highlighted gaps in these systems, and raised questions about how to coordinate more effective responses. Inequalities in healthcare systems that predated the global pandemic have been exacerbated, leaving vulnerable populations in danger of suffering greater morbidity and mortality rates. This is especially true in emerging market countries, which are beginning to see a significant increase in COVID-19 cases.
A lack of reliable data on real-time community transmission rates, coupled with capacity shortfalls in testing equipment, personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and medical staffing have hampered government responses. Such challenges make ongoing discussions about reopening economies extremely problematic. If we don’t know who’s been infected and who hasn’t, who’s immune to COVID-19 and who isn’t, how can government and healthcare officials make informed decisions?
Facing the unprecedented scale of this pandemic and the havoc it’s wreaking on healthcare and economic systems, governments are turning to innovative technologies like Civitas to improve their response to COVID-19.
Developed by two leading technology companies, Emerge and Penta Network, Civitas is a robust software application for key public health stakeholders to effectively track and manage community transmission of COVID-19. Emerge and Penta Network are currently working with public sector partners in emerging market countries to implement community traceability solutions for COVID-19. One of the big innovations of Civitas is a digital COVID-19 passport that streamlines the process of tracking test results from government authorized testing facilities.
With improved data transparency between testing facilities and other government agencies, Civitas enables governments to coordinate more effective transmission tracking and to connect that information to other economic activities. One example of this is using test results to issue travel documents and screen passengers at airports and other ports of entry, with the goal of helping to reopen borders and restart the tourist industry while still being able to manage transmission risk from travellers. In countries where tourism is a critical industry, a digital COVID-19 passport can be a game changer.
The Civitas digital passport is similar to the Certificates of Immunization or Yellow Cards that many travellers currently use as part of their travel documents for crossing borders. Rather than a paper record, Civitas uses blockchain technology to create a verifiable digital record of COVID-19 testing results and transmission tracking. Blockchain encryption offers a number of important protections to safeguard the privacy of digital passport holders, and to ensure that no one can tamper with digital records.
Civitas is also being used to help healthcare systems implement COVID-19 triage strategies in Latin America. Those triage strategies are vital to help governments and healthcare facilities maximize the use of limited resources to help as many patients as possible. Civitas includes a digital profile system that allows residents to access medical care through approved COVID-19 testing and treatment facilities. Users first connect with telemedicine professionals who evaluate the symptoms of a patient from home. Patients who require in-person medical attention for COVID-19 symptoms are immediately referred to hospitals, where a simple scan of their Civitas profile UID supplies their profile history to the attending physician. Civitas’s telemedicine software also offers health systems the opportunity to remotely support patients with more mild presentations of the virus, without having those cases overwhelm public health clinics. That frees up resources that are desperately needed for more urgent and vulnerable cases.
Civitas’s approach emphasizes privacy, security, and inclusion. It uses existing Internet and cellular network systems to transmit information, with citizens able to interact with the system by SMS, or through a Progressive Web App (PWA) — meaning there’s no need to download anything onto your device. It also means that Civitas can be deployed in emerging-economy countries with populations that do not have smartphones or lack widespread, reliable Internet access.
A related issue facing emerging-economy countries is the prevalence of geographical barriers. In these countries, sick people often need to travel long distances to access hospitals and clinics. This makes it difficult to manage transmission risk, and highlights the benefits of using software to improve outreach to geographically isolated populations.
Another place where Civitas hopes to make an impact is in workforce reintegration. Currently, many different health organizations are conducting tests to measure how COVID-19 antibodies work, and to what degree they offer immunity. Civitas helps health authorities establish a real-time record of recovered patients, enabling safe and fast reintegration into the workforce. For now, inconsistent and inaccurate methods for vetting immunization remain a major obstacle to returning people to work.
Civitas helps both governments and healthcare providers balance the sometimes conflicting priorities of need, urgency, and capacity. Emerge and Penta Network work with those key stakeholders to ensure that critical healthcare needs are being met, while also ensuring regulatory compliance. The result is a data-driven approach to managing community transmission of COVID-19 centred on authenticated data, streamlined interagency information sharing, and inclusive access for disadvantaged populations.
With a successful vaccine potentially 18 months or more away, more pandemic-related challenges are certain to arise. It is essential that governments adopt effective technologies to help manage and coordinate response efforts. Even as newly confirmed cases are dropping in many high-income countries, COVID-19 continues to spread to lower-income parts of the world. Projects like Civitas are working hard to build solutions that can address the challenges faced by these countries and their most vulnerable populations.
For more information, please contact hello@emergedev.co
