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. 2020 Apr 16;6(2):e18980.
doi: 10.2196/18980.

Global Preparedness Against COVID-19: We Must Leverage the Power of Digital Health

Sultan Mahmood #  1 , Khaled Hasan #  1 , Michelle Colder Carras #  2 , Alain Labrique #  2   3   4
Affiliations

Global Preparedness Against COVID-19: We Must Leverage the Power of Digital Health

Sultan Mahmood et al. JMIR Public Health Surveill. .

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has revealed many areas of public health preparedness that are lacking, especially in lower- and middle-income countries. Digital interventions provide many opportunities for strengthening health systems and could be vital resources in the current public health emergency. We provide several use cases for infection control, home-based diagnosis and screening, empowerment through information, public health surveillance and epidemiology, and leveraging crowd-sourced data. A thoughtful, concerted effort-leveraging existing experience and robust enterprise-grade technologies-can have a substantive impact on the immediate and distal consequences of COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; control; developing countries; global health; infection; informatics; internet; pandemic.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: SM and KH are with Digital Healthcare Solutions, a health care technology company. MCC and AL declare no financial conflicts. Work on this paper was not funded.

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