Digital health platform aids clinicians in COVID treatment

A newly launched digital health platform is helping clinicians determine the best treatment options for COVID-19 patients.

The $4 million initiative uses real-time national data and analytics to track the progression of COVID-19 — from early-stage diagnosis to severe illness.

In turn, it can help frontline healthcare workers make important clinical decisions, such as which patients to prioritise for acute care.

Professor Tom Snelling, Clinical Lead for the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP) and Head of the Health and Clinical Analytics team in the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, said the need for tools to monitor virus progression was ever-present but particularly strong with COVID-19 — a new and largely unpredictable pathogen.

“We need digital solutions that improve our knowledge of how best to manage people with COVID-19 in near real time,” Professor Snelling said.

“The CDAP has been built to rapidly extract and organise clinical data, which will help us learn why some people have severe disease and which treatments result in the best outcomes.”

Professor Tim Shaw, the Digital Health CRC’s Director of Research, said in addition to supporting clinicians during COVID-19, the platform would also have long-term clinical benefits.

“This project will allow us to help solve some of the issues we face in accessing and sharing national datasets to support frontline care,” he said.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Georgiy