Emergency Response to COVID-19 in Canada: Platform Development and Implementation for eHealth in Crisis Management

BACKGROUND: Public health emergencies like epidemics put enormous pressure on health care systems while revealing deep structural and functional problems in the organization of care. The current coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic illustrates this at a global level. The sudden increased demand on delivery systems puts unique pressures on pre-established care pathways. These extraordinary times require efficient tools for smart governance and resource allocation. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to develop an innovative web-based solution addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges of triaging, monitoring, and delivering nonhospital services unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: An adaptable crisis management digital platform was envisioned and designed with the goal of improving the system’s response on the basis of the literature; an existing shared health record platform; and discussions between health care providers, decision makers, academia, and the private sector in response to the COVID 19 epidemic. RESULTS: The Crisis Management Platform was developed and offered to health authorities in Ontario on a nonprofit basis. It has the capability to dramatically streamline patient intake, triage, monitoring, referral, and delivery of nonhospital services. It decentralizes the provision of services (by moving them online) and centralizes data gathering and analysis, maximizing the use of existing human resources, facilitating evidence-based decision making, and minimizing the risk to both users and providers. It has unlimited scale-up possibilities (only constrained by human health risk resource availability) with minimal marginal cost. Similar web-based solutions have the potential to fill an urgent gap in resource allocation, becoming a unique asset for health systems governance and management during critical times. They highlight the potential effectiveness of web-based solutions if built on an outcome-driven architecture. CONCLUSIONS: Data and web-based approaches in response to a public health crisis are key to evidence-driven oversight and management of public health emergencies.