How To Get Ahead Of The Next Pandemic And Retain Data Privacy
How To Get Ahead Of The Next Pandemic And Retain Data Privacy
IT Data Solutions
I believe that when someone says, “We’re living in unprecedented times,” what they really mean is, “We’re living in times we weren’t prepared for.”
Preparation, in any situation, means using the tools and resources at your disposal to safeguard against unlikely (though not unpredictable and certainly not unprecedented) events. There’s no doubt that COVID-19 is like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetime, but history offers plenty of precedent for global pandemics and economic instability.
Having spent more than 10 years working in enterprise IT, I’ve found that the current pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of today’s data management technology — namely, its catastrophic inability to support the rapid delivery of new solutions or protect data privacy.
Fragmented data, diverted attention
Healthcare agencies around the world have displayed a concerning lack of preparedness on how to leverage data to solve immediate challenges — scrambling to form data partnerships, offering conflicting directions on data privacy, and generally finding it difficult to operationalize data quickly and efficiently. All of these issues stem from the basic limitations of, and the blind spots caused by, the current IT delivery approach that exists within healthcare and pretty much every other sector.
Mending fragmented data by using outdated technologies like data sharing and data integration has eaten up so much time, money and IT resources that it’s almost impossible for healthcare agencies to deliver the solutions demanded in times of crisis.
They should, for example, be able to combine location data from mobile phone providers with results from testing centers to fuel contact tracing solutions without jeopardizing the privacy or anonymity of the individuals involved. Since there have already been plenty of proposals for snatching up cellphone data to fight the spread of the virus, wouldn’t it be nice if citizens were able to retain control of their data instead?
