Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 is a public health emergency that caused disastrous results in many countries. The global aim is to stop transmission and prevent the spread of the disease. To achieve it, every country needs to scale up emergency response mechanisms, educate and actively communicate with the public, intensify infected case finding, contact tracing, monitoring, quarantine of contacts, and isolation of cases. Responding to an emergency requires efficient collaboration and a multi-skilled approach (medical, information, statistical, political, social, and other expertise), which makes it hard to define one interface for all. As actors from different perspectives and domain backgrounds need to address diverse functions, the possibility to exchange available information quickly would be desirable. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint state-level public health institution has not been established, but is covered by entity competencies. In this sense, a geoportal has been developed as an epidemiological location-intelligence system (ELIS) that supports the exchange of such information between the entities and the cantons. For its development, open source software components in the cloud were used as a working platform with all the necessary functionalities. The geoportal provides an entry point for access to geospatial, epidemiological, environmental and statistical data used for analysis, geocoding of confirmed COVID-19 cases, identification of disease dynamics, identification of vulnerable groups, mapping of health capacities, and general modeling of infection spread with application support for communication and collaboration between all institutions and the public. The paper describes the challenges and ways to overcome them in the development and use of ELIS.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus pandemic is a continuous pandemic (COVID-19) caused by a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus [1,2,3]
The authors proposed a system that supports a workflow for the assessment and The authors proposed of a system that supports a workflow for the assessment im-the electronic improvement epidemiological surveillance, where data are takenand from provement ofrecords epidemiological surveillance, where data are taken from the electronic recof public health institutes, hospitals, and laboratories and grouped into a single epiords of public health institutes, hospitals, anddatabase, laboratories into are a single epi-(spatially and demiological database
Due to the visual effectiveness of the geoportal interface itself, it is generally very popular, its functionality is far broader than the spatial data interfaces used by news portals and some government agencies to present epidemic data
Summary
The novel coronavirus pandemic is a continuous pandemic (COVID-19) caused by a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus [1,2,3]. The system aims to provide epidemic data collection, processing and analysis, research of the COVID-19 epidemic, communication and exchange of information with public health service institutions, evaluation of the existing epidemic surveillance system and control measures taken. In addition to the difficulties with data exchange, the paper discusses the challenges that the project team had to deal with, such as data preparation and processing for analytical and modelling purposes; geocoding of tested, confirmed, and active cases; time dimension recognition; identification vulnerable population regions and available health resources; the modeling of the spread prediction of COVID-19; and, the facilitation of seamless and instantaneous communication and cooperation between all actors, which was the biggest challenge in the current situation.
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