Dr. Linda Hill, MD, MPH, is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UCSD, and the Director of the UCSD/SDSU General Preventive Medicine Residency.
The COVID-19 pandemic requires a rapid, focused and coordinated response. Clinicians are modifying their model of clinical care, and are adapting to ever-changing protocols; clinician-researchers are developing clinical trials that require rapid implementation; hospitals are facing PPE shortages and the need to adopt systems engineering tools to reformat their flow to reduce nosocomial transmission.
At The University of California San Diego, we developed Earth 2.0 CO-Respond to meet the needs of these front-line clinicians, researchers, hospitals and public health professionals. The platform links problems with solutions and posts the quality-controlled results on a public website.
Problems are submitted by health care workers via email (COVID-help@ucsd.edu), and a ticketing system facilitates rapid response were solutions are crowd-sourced through a supported Slack channel and a talent pool of faculty, staff and students, before being posted at https://earth2-covid.ucsd.edu/home.
Topics range from research (clinical research, clinical trials, links to protocols) to needs (PPE, equipment, testing) to innovation (novel PPE, new ventilators, testing alternatives, public health solutions).
The Earth 2.0 platform was initially developed to promote crowd-sourced solutions and citizen science around broad issues of public health significance. With the onset of the pandemic, the platform was quickly modified to respond to the pandemic. In addition to the rapid response system, Earth 2.0 is creating and supporting apps to facilitate management of the pandemic, in clinic, hospital and community. The apps completed include a Red-cap linked program to track symptoms in clinical trials (http://covid-help.ucsd.edu/support/solutions/articles/60000660413-covid-19-clinical-trial-symptom-tracker), and in development: Oasis for support contact tracking and symptom tracking, and Homebound for managing symptoms and interfacing with physicians and caregivers.
ACPM members and all health care workers are invited to join in the discussion, contribute solutions, and share in the opportunity for posting and publishing solutions online by either going through our website or writing me an email at llhill@health.ucsd.edu