As we reach unprecedented numbers of patients infected worldwide, COVID-19 has brought the world to a stop. Governments and healthcare organizations are working around the clock to control the spread of this pandemic using all means possible.

In collaboration with Cerner, the UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention’s Wareed Program is innovating and morphing itself into a comprehensive pandemic defense system enabling risk assessment, contact tracing, extensive testing and quarantine management across the Northern Emirates.

In the need of the hour, creating a shared patient worklist has ensured all suspected and diagnosed patients can be easily tracked, contacted and kept safe.

Several new initiatives have been designed, developed and implemented to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the UAE, including:

Preventive medicine department module: This supports mass surveillance, ensuring instant onsite patient registration, case tracking and results of larger groups of the population to avoid any further spread.

Primary care services module: This provides invaluable support for communities across the Northern Emirates who rely on Primary Health Care Centers as their first point of call, allowing clinicians to screen, refer, track and easily follow up with patients.

Home & Community Quarantine module: This ensures all patients referred for quarantine are efficiently placed, followed up with and released when appropriate.

E-visit strategy: In secondary care, we have implemented a strategy to reduce the footfall in facilities and make use of tele-consultations. Clinicians are utilizing new modules built to efficiently test, diagnose, quarantine and refer on patients while organizing critical care and isolation wards in the process.

First public dashboard: Finally, our strategy uses data to evaluate, learn and improve. With so much data being fed into the system, we wanted to make it easy to visualize, interpret and execute our on-going COVID-19 strategy. The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention’s first public dashboard allows us to quickly understand the bigger picture, to evolve as an organization and be better placed to manage this pandemic.

We continue to work with the Ministry using a strategy of continuous improvement and making innovative changes for better healthcare outcomes.

For information regarding Cerner’s content and assistance in light of the COVID-19, please click here.