People infected with the new coronavirus, or the medical institutions treating them, will input their symptoms into a new centralized data system to be introduced by the health ministry, according to sources.
ID numbers will be issued by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to people who are infected and those who have had close contact with them, and they will be asked to enter their body temperature and various symptoms via their computers or smartphones. The aim is to efficiently collect and manage information to reduce the burden on public health centers, which are currently overwhelmed with work related to the pandemic.
The ministry intends to launch the system early next month.
There are 468 public health centers set up by prefectural and other local governments around the nation. Each center is conducting daily checks on the health status of infected people and those who have had close contact with them by phone or fax with the patients themselves or the medical institutions treating them.
At the same time, public health centers are also responsible for such tasks as operating telephone consultation services for people experiencing symptoms, transporting specimens for PCR testing from hospitals to laboratories, and arranging for infected people to be accommodated at hospitals or hotels.
The number of infected people has exceeded 10,000 in Japan, and hundreds of new cases are being identified across the country every day. If the new system is put into operation, public health centers will be able to check the status of patients more quickly, looking through information entered via smartphones and other devices without having to call each person or check with hospitals.
It would also save the centers the work of reporting to prefectural and other local governments.
The public health center in Wakayama City began such a trial in March ahead of the central government, using an app that allows people who have had close contact with patients to enter their health status on their smartphones.
Using the app, one staff member was able to handle the daily work related to about 70 people in approximately 20 minutes, work that normally took four staff members two hours to complete.
"The reduced work will allow us to spend more time on other tasks," center director Hideo Matsuura said.
The Miyagi prefectural and Otsu city governments also introduced similar systems in the middle of this month.
"Using information technology not only reduces the work but also makes it easier to analyze wide-area clusters, " said Ken Osaka, a professor at Tohoku University and a member of the health ministry's cluster infection task force. "All local governments should introduce the new system as soon as possible so that the state of infections can be analyzed nationwide," Osaka said.
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