The global pandemic is far from over, we want to take this opportunity to recognize and applaud the continued heroic efforts by front-line workers—healthcare workers, first responders, service workers, and others—around the world. They put their lives at risk every day to save patients and keep critical operations running.

While much of the recent news regarding has been discouraging, it is important to recognize there is some good news regarding the fight against COVID-19. And given the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference is almost upon us, this is an opportunity to reflect on how Public Health organizations have used technology to battle the greatest health crisis of our time. From the earliest days of the outbreak, Microsoft and our global partner ecosystem have used the latest technologies in new and innovative ways to help Public Health officials meet the challenge of COVID-19.

Public Health organizations around the globe continue to face challenges. The Delta variant, vaccine hesitancy, breakthrough infections, continued vaccine and resource shortages all are perpetuating this battle. Still, there have been bright spots, thanks to the tenacity, ingenuity, and unwavering commitment of Public Health professionals and organizations—as well as their use of the latest technology. This has enabled public health to attack the pandemic with unprecedented agility and responsiveness.

From the earliest days of tracking the COVID-19 outbreaks—long before a global pandemic was proclaimed—Public Health organizations began to be challenged with collecting increasing amounts of data from hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices as well as laboratories. This was often a cumbersome, lengthy process. It could take weeks or even months before the massive amount of data could be collected and analyzed to unlock meaningful insights. Technologies such as Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse helped accelerate and scale data collection and analysis around the world.

Partners like Esri were leveraging their Azure supported ArcGIS Online system to help Public Health officials monitor the spread of the COVID-19 virus by visualizing that data on global maps and dashboards.

When accurate tests were created to detect the virus, many Public Health organizations turned to solutions built on Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform to help them quickly roll out COVID-19 testing in their communities. This included registration systems to schedule the tests as well as test-result reporting.

As the disease spread, people turned to their Public Health organization for answers. This overwhelmed phone systems and took valuable human capital to address these questions at scale. Virtual assistants using Microsoft Azure Health Bot service played a vital role in reducing the burden on Public Health personnel, allowing them to focus on other aspects of the pandemic.

We all remember that early in the pandemic, ventilators, PPE, and other critical supplies were in short supply. Hospitals and clinics were experiencing a dire shortage of resources, while others were sitting on surpluses. Microsoft worked with public health, hospital networks and others to quickly create the Hospital Emergency Response solution, a Power Platform solution for healthcare emergency response. It allowed visibility into inventories across different care networks. As a result, public health was able to get supplies to the points of greatest need.

As early as last year, while pharmaceutical companies sent newly developed COVID-19 vaccines through clinical trials, Microsoft and our partners are working with Public Health officials to accelerate the pace of vaccine distribution and vaccinations with technology. This included taking steps to ensure distribution from the pharma manufacturing facilities to the vaccination sites.

Vaccine supply chain was just one aspect of this unprecedented global challenge. Prioritizing and scheduling initial appointments—along with the appropriate follow-ups and reminder communications—was a critical need. Then there was integration with existing immunization information systems to update patients’ vaccination records. Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft industry and product teams jumped into action to work with an ecosystem of partners around the world including Accenture, EY, Quisitive and their MazikCare Platform, and many others to deliver solutions to quickly and efficiently distribute and administer vaccines to every community.

Vaccine supply is still a challenge in many parts of the world. Even in areas where supply is sufficient, pockets of vaccine hesitancy have started to stall vaccination rates. To help address this major issue, a coalition of non-profits, healthcare organizations, and technology providers, working in collaboration with local communities and Public Health agencies, have embarked on the Vaccination Equity Initiative (VEI). The goal of VEI is to deliver vaccinations and other essential health services to those who are underserved, vulnerable, or have low access to healthcare. Further information about VEI, including how organizations can participate, may be obtained by contacting VEI@Microsoft.com.

One example of how technology can help address vaccine hesitancy comes from our partner Zencity. Zencity is using Azure Cognitive Services to analyze a variety of public data sources—including social sentiment—in order to help Public Health officials understand the underlying concerns of their citizens.¹ Using this insight, mayors, Public Health officials and other government leaders can create communication plans and outreach programs to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

As vaccine rates continue to increase globally and laboratory tests are widely available, worldwide efforts to reopen economies and restore international travel have also created an urgent need for secure, verifiable health information. Businesses, entertainment and sports venues, academic institutions and governments worldwide increasingly need a trustworthy way to verify vaccination status or laboratory test results for those returning to onsite activities and public spaces. Individuals who have been vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 want to access and store a free paper or digital copy of their records to easily carry and share, without fear of misplacing an immunization card or disclosing unnecessary information when sharing their results.

To fill this emerging need, in 2020 Microsoft joined in forming VCI, a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations committed to ensuring individuals have access to a trustworthy and verifiable copy of their COVID-19 vaccination records and test results. The VCI-developed SMART Health Cards framework is being used worldwide to create vaccine certificates that adhere to core principles, including interoperability, equity, privacy, and security.

While there is still a long way to go in the global fight against COVID-19, the new wave of cloud technology will play a significant role in defeating this crisis.

It will also help us prepare for the next one. Because this is not the last global virus we will see.

¹ Governing – “A Powerful Tool for Overcoming Vaccine Hesitancy”, May 19, 2021.

The post How technology is helping in the fight against the pandemic appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As vaccines and immunity abate the pandemic, children will return to the public eye, sparking an increase in reporting in child maltreatment allegations. Organizations need to prepare to minimize human suffering and avoid a cascading system collapse. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought suffering to people and economies around the globe. But the invisible pain will be realized over the next several years. Well-meaning lockdowns will have unintended consequences after a year of isolation for vulnerable children and families.¹ Sadly, those consequences will reveal the next crisis as the pandemic subsides and we weigh the magnitude of those suffering in silence. Child welfare systems will be at the forefront of combatting maltreatment that has been and still is occurring. If they are unprepared, the costs, both human and economic, will be incalculable. Governments need to plan now.

When I ran the state’s child welfare system in Arizona, it was important to understand the role of seasonality in the volume of maltreatment reports. For example, when school is out during the summer months, child welfare systems experience a reduction in the amount of abuse and neglect allegations requiring response, investigation, and mitigation.  This is because teachers, frequently mandated reporters, no longer have eyes on children. Summer was the time to improve the organization and prepare for the resumption of school when maltreatment reports spike. At the same time, summer became the season of some of the most extreme cases of chronic abuse or death. Simply put, declines in report volume do not mean children are receiving a reprieve.

Isolation is dangerous for vulnerable children. Lockdowns now have extended normal seasonality far beyond summer. During my career—both as a homicide detective for a major metropolitan city, and as the head of Arizona’s child welfare system—secrecy was the key ingredient to some of the most egregious cases of child physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and death.

Most frequently, children suffering chronic abuse are vulnerable due to their dependency, small stature, inability to seek help, and invisibility to the public eye. They don’t attend school or daycare, and they are purposefully hidden. There is a reason that 88 percent of child fatalities due to maltreatment involve children younger than 7.² Moreover, parents acting alone or with another individual or parent were responsible for more than 80 percent of abuse and neglect-related child fatalities.²

The impact of pandemic lockdowns

What does this mean when considering the impact of pandemic-imposed lockdowns? In the extreme sense, it means some children suffered catastrophic incidents of abuse (including death) or have been suffering in silence awaiting detection. Moreover, the emotional, physical, nutritional, and educational well-being of children have been impaired.

As the pandemic abates and normalcy resumes, vulnerable children will return to the public eye. Child abuse hotlines will experience increased volume, sparking more investigations, increased caseloads, and growing backlogs. As these factors compound, more children will enter foster care, driving the need for more service providers, more foster homes, and more court dockets. Supply and demand principles will become significantly off balance. Combine this with high turnover and budget overruns and you have a child welfare system crisis. In time, this will result in more high-profile cases of abuse and death, leading to media and public uproar.

Governments tend to move slowly. When they act with urgency, it is typically in response to crisis situations. These are the times that public policies are amended or added, and legislative appropriations are boosted. In some cases, innovation and technology improvements are sought and funded. During my time leading Arizona’s child welfare system, we replaced our 26-year-old mainframe system with cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics. This three-year project was energized and funded because of child fatalities, capacity shortfalls, and a national scandal that broke prior to my political appointment. In short, the outdated technology system was blamed for children falling through the cracks.

The problem with a reactionary approach is that people will suffer intensely before solutions are pursued. When it comes to the pandemic, and soon-to-be realized consequences of lockdowns, child welfare systems, and their overarching governments need to prepare now. Over the past year, child welfare systems were challenged by the need to don PPE to find and protect children, contact trace, maintain their workforces, and retain their placements when foster parents feared exposure from children delivered to their care.

They also needed to maintain compliance with court case plans requiring best efforts to ameliorate the reasons children enter foster care. Parent aid services, drug treatment, medical and behavioral health treatment, birth family visits, and many court appearances needed to occur by remote or virtual means. If these functions were abandoned, children would remain in foster care indefinitely, further degrading system capacity and leaving children and families in limbo.

Creating a more responsive government

These pains were certainly not without gain. In terms of innovating social service practice, what has occurred over the past year would likely have been slowly pursued during the next decade. The pandemic forced government’s hand to adapt and maintain core duties by remote or virtual means. Moving brick and mortar workforces to remote has been a huge accomplishment. Moreover, turnover studies have shown that millennial workforces desire flexibility and remote offerings, a model not typically supported by government until now. Virtual visits and services such as telemedicine were deployed. Virtual court hearings have also been leveraged to maintain compliance with child permanency goals.

These are great advancements, and the gains need to be fully planted. But we need to be thoughtful about maintaining this hybrid approach. Child welfare stakeholders and technology leaders need to determine what interactions can be accomplished by remote or virtual means while remaining steadfast on required in-person interactions. Capacity will be retained by giving organizations the ability to triage the riskiest interventions while managing less critical tasks remotely or virtually. For instance, a child-safety assessment cannot be put off or done remotely, but other visits or hearings can be done with technology.

It is indisputable that the impacts of this global pandemic have been hard felt, and some have yet to be realized. It also seems clear that many ways of doing business have forever changed, sadly for some but heartening for others. Child welfare will be the “canary in the coal mine,” as the unseen masses of vulnerable children return to the public eye. But we can get this right. What we need is empathy, a willingness to plan, sustainable political will and funding, and a responsible convergence of technology and social service practices. Some organizations will move gradually and seek modernizations within their current capabilities. Others will be ready for a modern cloud-based Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS). Regardless of an organization’s current state of readiness, it’s important to see technology as a force multiplier for the many social servants who protect vulnerable children and strengthen vulnerable families.

About the author: Greg McKay is Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector lead for Public Health and Social Services.  He was formerly the Director of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety and prior to that was a Homicide detective for the Phoenix Police Department.

Learn more and engage industry experts during a March 31, 2021, Digital Forum: Preparing for the Post Pandemic Fallout in Child Welfare

Read about the importance of remote access within governments and visit Microsoft in Government to learn more.

References:

¹ Ofsted: Children hardest hit by COVID-19 pandemic are regressing in basic skills and learning

² Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities 2018: Statistics and Interventions

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