Building the COVID-19 Collaborative Emergency Network: a case study of COVID-19 outbreak in Hubei Province, China

The purpose of this study is to uncover and optimize the structure and performance of the collaborative network that emerged in response to COVID-19 in Hubei Province, China. This study reconstructed the Hubei Public Health Emergency Response Network as the actual collaborative network and built COVID-19 Collaborative Emergency Network as a planned task-oriented collaborative network. Based on the data sets of the inter-organizational collaboration collected from the content analysis, this study explored the core tasks of the participating actors and their relationships during the COVID-19 emergency response, and built six sub-networks to accomplish six core tasks. Network analysis was used with the Pajek software to compare the structural characteristics and performance of the planned network with the actual one and six sub-networks, and identified the central actors, key bridges, and brokers in networks and sub-networks separately. Findings suggested that COVID-19 Collaborative Emergency Network had a more tightly, central, and connective structure than Hubei Public Health Emergency Response Network, because it had more participating actors (i.e., databases and AI systems), more powerful and strong collaborative relationships with research institutions and non-profit organizations. With practical-based recommendations for inter-organizational collaboration, this study concluded that COVID-19 Collaborative Emergency Network could significantly enhance the local capacity of Hubei Province for emergency collaboration, which provided insights for building and optimizing COVID-19 collaborative networks in other provinces of China, even other countries.