Uruguay: COVID-19

Uruguay (Salud.UY) developed a digital strategy to deal with the coronavirus COVID-19, which includes the creation of new digital communication channels focused on healthcare. These new channels were developed to provide quality information to more people, to avoid saturating face-to-face healthcare services, and to decongest telephone communication channels.

Click here to read Uruguay's Digital Strategy against COVID-19.

Virtual assistant on Government’s web page offers:

• Information about the disease and its progress in Uruguay.
• Containment measures and recommendations
• A unique epidemiological questionnaire created by the Ministry of Public Health for people with possible symptoms.
• This virtual assistant is integrated into the two most widely used messaging platforms in Uruguay to facilitate communication with people: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

IOS and Android app: Coronavirus UY

• Provides information and is integrated with the epidemiological questionnaire, like the other communication channels
• Assist the population to contact health providers
• Once identified as a clinical case, people can enter their daily symptoms and communicate by telemedicine with the healthcare personnel of their healthcare provider directly (see case management)

A clinical assistance platform associated with the Coronavirus UY app

• Through a teleconsultation, this platform allows to provide health care to suspected and confirmed cases that have a clinical indication, improving the quality of care for people and protecting health personnel in contact with possible vectors of infection.
• Telemedicine, which supports this process following the principles of universality, equity, quality of service, efficiency, decentralization, complementarity and confidentiality, constitutes the most efficient means of reaching home care by health teams, allowing quick contact, maintain the doctor-patient link and report on the evolution of the disease without having to travel to provide the service. This allows maintaining the isolation pattern and taking care of health personnel in contact with possible vectors of the infection.

• Currently, there is a single case tracking tool of COVID-19 that allows health personnel to follow up on cases entered in the single form and contact each registered person following the protocols and guidelines in force issued by the Ministry of Public Health.

Dedicated phoneline for public and private providers to report cases

•  Created to confront the coronavirus COVID-19 by the Ministry of Public Health (0800 1919), they download information on a single form for entering epidemiological information

• A digital tool was developed to collect and monitor information regarding management of hospital beds, ventilators and personnel available in different levels of hospitalization services affected by possible cases of COVID-19.

• Uruguay has created maps and internal dashboards for real-time monitoring of the current status of cases of COVID-19, health system response, population mobility and adherence to social distancing recommendations. Uruguay is currently developing algorithms to monitor epidemiological trends as the population begins to come out of isolation in order to avoid peaks of new cases.

• Uruguay has a plan to return to normal activity and is using business intelligence tools and data-analytics to constantly monitor the curve to support decision-making in the recovery phase.