Numbers play a big role in the decision making of the Philippine government when it comes to battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Metro Manila and nearby provinces were reverted to enhanced community quarantine, the strictest form of lockdown, after a surge in new infections was recorded. The Duterte administration also granted medical workers’ request for a “timeout” back in 2020 after they flagged that the healthcare system was getting overwhelmed.
The Department of Health (DOH) even made it a point to simplify its reporting of complex numbers and provide important data to the public in an easy-to-use repository.
Utilizing this information and DOH’s regular data drop, a Singapore-based AI solutions firm developed a tracking tool to help Filipinos keep an eye on available hospital beds and ventilators by location. Data Natin, or “our data” in Filipino, is a data aggregator complemented by artificial intelligence programmed by SQREEM Technologies. The same AI system developed by SQREEM to help governments’ contact tracing efforts worldwide underwent redesign, recoding and further redevelopment to power Data Natin.
“We recognized that the Philippines was doing stellar work making data around incidences of COVID available with data points such as the availability of beds and ventilators being accessible to the public, but it was unstructured,” explained Ian Chapman-Banks, CEO and co-founder of SQREEM. “Learning from our experience in the contact tracing world, the goal was to produce updated and meaningful data, organized by live tracking dashboards so that people can get to the resources they need more efficiently.
Chapman-Banks also pointed out that the tool can help even healthcare workers. “This means a more equitable distribution of patients resulting in less burden for certain clinics and hospitals. This is part of our initiative to lend support to countries as we had done in the past,” he said.
From the dashboard, users can monitor the spread of infection in their area according to age, level of severity, city, or neighborhood. Viewers can also track hospitals’ capacity within their locale and in nearby areas to determine which hospitals have available COVID or ICU beds and ventilators at a glance. This allows users to make informed and timely decisions that can improve a patient’s chances of recovery.
SQREEM invested $500,000 in time and resources to create the tracker which aims to help doctors and patients in their crucial race against time, especially in urban hotspots where there may not be sufficient hospital beds for patients.
DOH Update
As of July 16, 2021, 4:00 PM COVID-19 Update, DOH reported a total of 1,496,328 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 5,676 of which are new cases, bringing the number of active cases to 48,480. There are 2,670 people who recovered from the disease, increasing the total number of recoveries to 1,421,372. However, 162 more died, increasing the local death toll to 26,476.
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