A Noval Approach to Integrate Heterogeneous Healthcare Information for COVID-19 Pandemic Emergency Management

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Healthcare systems in Canada and worldwide are not designed for coping with a pandemic such as the COVID-19. A great challenge presented to pandemic emergency management is to make timely and correct decisions on reconfiguring or reallocating resources and patients. This project will address this challenge with a focus on healthcare information systems - i.e., how the healthcare information system can efficiently support the decision making process in emergency management. This project will be carried out by a partnership between the University of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA). SHA has a mandate to provide direction and coordination to all healthcare units across the province of Saskatchewan. In SHA's on-going fight with the COVID-19 pandemic, the data flooding over SHA appears with the characteristics of high volume, great variety, and often fails to support decision making in the COVID-19 pandemic. The research group of the University of Saskatchewan, participating in this partnership, is specialized in information systems with the experience of emergency management and resilience engineering. The overall objective of this project is to advance the healthcare information system technology for the COVID-19 emergency operation management to better support rapid decision making. The project has three specific objectives: 1) to improve the understanding of data and its association with counter-measures for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) to develop a new healthcare information system that is flexible and reconfigurable to work in both the normal and pandemic situations, along with a generic data model for healthcare information systems of any other province; 3) to develop tools for data acquisition, data integration, and data presentation, along with the user interface for these tools.