The Ministry of Health, Oman’s Covid-19 monitoring platform, known as ‘Tarassud Plus’, is used as monitoring system for diagnosing, following up, and tracking the medical condition of individuals infected with COVID-19 under quarantine, by using artificial intelligence and advanced tracking technologies.
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The world has been battling with COVID-19 since the past two years. Both public and private health systems across the world are adopting different strategies to put an end to the spread of the pandemic and save the lives of people. Despite several novel strategies and solutions; isolating and contact tracing individuals continues to remain a challenging task.
During the first wave of the pandemic, shortage of medical resources was a universal challenge due to exponential increase of infected people in a short time. Remote patient management became the need of the hour, but the shortage of medical staff for timely monitoring of quarantined individuals remained a challenge. The qScout platform developed by Qure.ai was adopted by the Ministry of Health Oman, for contact monitoring and remote patient management at a national scale. It was also integrated withthe government health surveillance platform Tarassud to give population level alerts to authorities.
qScout used AI chatbot customised to the local languages and engaged with confirmed cases capturing their primary and secondary symptoms. The AI engine analysed the information and provided insights enabling virtual triaging and timely escalation for medical requirements, thereby minimizing and scheduling visits to medical institutions, and focusing only on cases that need a medical examination. The phone based chatbot, deployed within the Tarssud Plus app, communicated through regular interval questions which the individuals could respond with clickable options for ease of use. The chatbot is interactive and its questions are designed to keep it user friendly.
qScout developed by “Qure.ai” in partnership with Al Burkan Company was used to remotely monitor individuals to check for worsening of their medical condition on a daily basis. This platform helped alleviate the burden of health workers and control the spread of the pandemic.
The information gathered was processed using algorithms in the backend to assess the risk factors. This information was then relayed back to the Tarassud Plus platform to indicate risk categories.
Over a span of 8 months, approximately 400,000 Covid-19 patients under quarantine in Oman regularly interacted with a software for over thousands of sessions taking off a significant proportion of healthcare workers’ burden.
Using data mining, the system could also estimate the potential surge in cases across regions of the country, helping health workers and government monitor hotspot regions and prepare for receiving cases.
The MOH also provided a wearable gadget that sent real-time information to the competent authorities about the movements and locations of a quarantined or infected person. It could also send alerts if this person left their location or tried to remove the gadget.
Through managing symptoms and triaging peopleremotely using the AI-powered tool, Qure.ai was able to help the Ministry of Health Oman ensure that individuals are only brought to the hospital at the right time, minimizing panic and optimizing utilisation of resources.
The modularity and integration capability of qScout with various web/mobile applications, interoperability built in from inception facilitates enrolment and engagement with millions of users via the Tarassud platform.
