How technology can help in defeating the pandemic like COVID 19
How technology can help in defeating the pandemic like COVID 19
Over the last two decades, health informatics has emerged as a powerful revolutionary tool for organizing, managing and analyzing health records in the public health care system. Recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, health informatics has become more essential than ever. During the pandemic outbreak across the world, it becomes crucial to monitor, identify, manage and find a solution to facilitate rapid control of deadly diseases. Health informatics has already proved itself to be one of the strongest tools in this regard. The workflow of health informatics dealing with pandemics, starts with the evidence-based data surveillance – the real-time health data acquisition – required for monitoring the population’s health status, in order to learn and understand the problem (e.g. in case of a pandemic, understanding the type and nature of disease outbreak). After surveillance, the data is evaluated with the help of both wet and dry lab experiments, followed by data analysis to find out the cause or risk factor behind the problem (e.g. in case of COVID-19, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)). Once the factor is identified, the health informatics works parallelly with wet-lab experiments to establish intervention methods to control the outbreak. Health informatics uses data analysis and machine learning approach to find out the ways for controlling and eliminating the problem (e.g. in case of COVID-19, suggesting social distancing/ home quarantine methods). Once the method is proposed, it is applied to the real-world situations and modified according to the real-time response – feedback.
To facilitate swift monitoring, rapid identification and smooth management, there is a need for advancements in this sector. VIT Bhopal is starting a new undergraduate programme- B.Tech CSE with specialization in Health Informatics, for creating future-ready engineers who will participate and contribute to the future advancement of health informatics. At VIT Bhopal, the curriculum of Health Informatics includes courses like health data mining, healthcare analytics, public health informatics, telemedicine, medical imaging and global health challenge, for preparing the students to meet the demand of the future health care industries in the post cornona world.
