When COVID-19 arrived in Mexico in early March, the governor of Querétaro, Francisco Domínguez, gave his administration a week to design a plan that would allow local fitness officials to fight the pandemic and prevent contagion.
“At the time, we had no COVID-19 cases, however, we saw what was happening in other countries and knew that we had to identify and treat inflamed residents without delay,” said Juan Martin Granados Torres, secretary of government of The state of Querétaro, “We also had to save our hospitals and fitness staff from being overwhelmed.”
Torres and his team of public protection specialists and generation architects had to be artistic: there was no time to build a COVID-19 tracking formula from scratch. The team tested an existing public protection platform that the state introduced two years ago, which tens of thousands of Queretaro citizens and criminal justice officials used to inform and analyze the activity of criminals in their communities.
“Because the technological architecture is so well structured, we knew that it could be temporarily reused to help citizens report their COVID-19 symptoms as well,” says Pedro Toscuento, director of the Querétaro Security Information and Analysis Center (CIAS), who informs Torres
The platform, called COSMOS, was designed through Granados and built through the Toscuento team the Oracle Java SE Progression Kit and an Oracle knowledge base run on Exaknowledge. It now operates in Exaknowledge Cloud – Customer, allowing the state to offload the flexibility and load-saving of a cloud-based formula, with Oracle offering remote formula maintenance, while protecting citizens’ personal data by retaining knowledge and physical infrastructure in state knowledge. Focus.
“We chose Oracle over Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud because it introduced us to a top point of knowledge and security coverage for our highly sensitive knowledge,” Toscuento says. “With Oracle Exaknowledge Cloud – Customer, we have not only been able to maintain all the knowledge of our own firewalls, but we can also make larger, custom-designed Internet and cellular installations for citizens and public servers.”
Using the redefined COSMOS app, the Toscuento team worked with directors and physicians to expand a 25-question survey, called COVAPP, which was held on the agency’s online page or in the mobile app developed in less than 3 weeks. Residents can download the survey, enter their symptoms, and submit it for examination, research, and diagnosis.
“When residents upload their surveys, the system itself screens the answers and determines which symptoms get flagged for further analysis,” says José Ponce, medical director for the government secretary of the state of Querétaro, who worked with Toscuento’s team and the state Secretariat of Healthcare to develop the questionnaire. If symptoms are consistent with those published by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, then the completed questionnaires are routed to a call center, where an agent reaches out to gather more details about the severity of symptoms, and then sends that feedback to a doctor for diagnosis.
“We screen initially for symptoms such as, fever, headaches, and coughs, but the key marker for COVID-19 is shortness of breath,” Ponce says. “That’s when residents are immediately routed from the call center to a medical professional, and depending on the severity of symptoms, are either directed to self-isolate or scheduled for treatment at the nearest hospital.”
61,000 Diagnoses Provided
So far, the system has provided 61,000 diagnoses statewide. Residents have downloaded 18,488 mobile versions of the survey via Android devices and about 8,600 from the Apple store. So far Querétaro has been faring better than much of Mexico against COVID-19, with just 89 cases out of every 100,000 people and 75% available capacity in its hospitals, Ponce says.
“The COVAPP application doesn’t just screen for COVID-19 symptoms, it also provides guidelines to help people minimize their exposure to infection and prevent the virus from spreading,” Ponce says. The technology program has helped the state’s overall efforts to combat the virus in Querétaro, including to “keep our hospitals open for the citizens who need immediate, critical care.”
Organic hay maker and Sasha Banks-Louie is a leading journalist at Oracle, covering cloud infrastructure, startups and institutes.