The global COVID-19 pandemic is upon us. Everyone does their upmost best in a joint fight against time to limit the infection rate currently inflicting our country. Reducing the infection rate is very important, so the capacity of the healthcare system can keep up with the need for patient care, thus limiting the crisis. The actions that have already been taken are very far-reaching. Many of our colleagues, friends, and family have already lost their job or have been laid off with major financial and social consequences not only for them but also for the entire community. Balancing these two issues; limiting the infection rate and, at the same time, limiting the social impact on society is not an easy task and must be handled with major care.

It is thereby very important that major impacting decisions are made from objective structured real-time data. There are some good examples of this globally already, but in most countries, this is not possible yet. Either because the systems do not exist or because the systems are outdated. Deprecated systems provide a large delay in delivering relevant structured data to decision-makers for relevant action at the right time.

In the healthcare sector, such as in Scandinavia, the split between primary and secondary healthcare is very clear, it is very important to use the right data to make the right decisions. In my opinion, it will be wrong to make decisions in situations where a pandemic development is happening so quickly, on data from the secondary healthcare sector, and then use the data from the primary healthcare sector in projecting consequences going forward. These data are difficult to capture and are often only available to decision-makers way too late or in poor quality, and can, therefore, have fatal consequences in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic we’re facing.

If we are to believe this slide from China, proper actions taken on correct structured data, at the right times, is crucial to prevent and limit the extent of the pandemic.

Jesper Melin Ganc-Petersen, CEO PatientSky