Philippines to digitize surveillance of COVID-19 cases —DOH

The Philippines is working with the World Health Organization to digitize its surveillance of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases and prevent data inconsistencies, the Department of Health (DOH) said Wednesday.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that the COVID KAYA application will be adopted to reduce the need for manual encoding of patients’ data.

“Magiging automated ang ilang proseso sa pagkalap ng data kaya mababawasan ang ating encoding errors,” she said in a virtual press briefing.

The University of the Philippines (UP) Resilience Institute earlier pointed out numerous data points from the DOH that changed overnight as well as inconsistencies in encoding. 

The department has since clarified that the errors only account for less than 1 percent of all the data. 

“The DOH remains to be committed to transparency and we welcome feedback from the expert community,” Vergeire said.

COVID KAYA

Stephanie Sy, chief of Thinking Machines Data Science that is working with the DOH, explained that COVID KAYA will allow frontliners to encode data immediately into a digital system rather than fill out case investigation forms.

“This means that the number of steps it takes to collect data… can all be centralized. I think that will really help everybody make better decisions,” she said.

“I believe that we began deployment of COVID KAYA and we hope to have that one system to follow cases live and have it reflected in our data within the next week,” Sy added.

She also said that the inconsistencies and errors pointed out by UP experts were caused by a mix of factors: “Sometimes it’s an encoding issue, sometimes it’s a process issue. Sometimes, a form was filled out incorrectly or tagged the wrong person.”

“Our goal here is to create a data system that can account for these errors, correct these errors, and have the corrected data sets reflected so that policymakers can make good decisions,” Sy said.

She also said that they will publicize all corrections made to data sets for transparency starting Wednesday. — BM, GMA News