Het Vlaams Agentschap Zorg & Gezondheid (VAZG) is responsible for the recognition, licensing and subsidizing of various providers and services for health care, elderly care, home care, residential care, and other forms of care, for facilitating the cooperation and data sharing between these services, for the organization of preventive health services such as vaccinations and screening programs, for the control of infectious diseases, for environmental health monitoring, and for the organization of the Flemish social protection programs.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, VAZG was faced with the challenge to keep track and report on a daily basis on the number of infected patients and healthcare workers and the number of COVID-19 related deceases for the care homes under their authority. First complexity was to collect data from more than 500 elderly, home, residential and other care homes with each between 50 to 150 healthcare staff to contact.
The solution
We decided to use Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a cloud based email service, for sending personalized e-mails to the healthcare professionals. These daily mails are sent from a Lambda Function which are scheduled with AWS EventBridge. The respondents receive a link to a Google form through which they can enter the requested health data.
The EventBridge schedules a “data stream” Lambda Function for retrieving the desired health data through a Google API and converts the data into a JSON & CSV file which is stored in AWS S3. After some cleansing and preparation, this data is used by the BI team to build Tableau dashboards which are used by the COVID-19 taskforce.
Kudos to Nicolai and Berk for their contribution in the fight against COVID-19.
