Better together: Collaborating with healthcare organizations around the world in the fight against COVID-19

Both personally and professionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered daily life for so many of us around the world. Families, governments, health organizations and businesses are being rapidly and significantly affected by the pandemic.

As a public health challenge, COVID-19 is unparalleled in its scope and scale. Scientists and healthcare professionals around the world have stepped up and come together to fight the virus, and the level of collaboration has been inspiring.

The burden that COVID-19 has placed on frontline health workers cannot be understated, and health professionals around the world have been fighting tirelessly, and risking their own safety, to save lives. With health organizations struggling under immense pressure, new technologies offer vital support.

Digital health is already making a real difference, not only in the fight against COVID-19, but across the entire healthcare ecosystem. At such a critical moment for global health, the industry has been quick to rise to the challenge and prove its value, demonstrating the long-term positive impact that digital tools can have across healthcare.

At Ada, we are dedicated to creating tools that can provide the most value and impact for health systems around the world. Our team has been working at speed, and around the clock, to respond to evolving needs and support health organizations at this critical time.

Last month we launched the Ada COVID-19 assessment and screener, to help people identify and understand COVID-19 symptoms and guide them on appropriate next steps. Combining world-class medical knowledge from organizations including the WHO, CDC, NHS and Robert Koch Institute, the screener enables individuals around the world to assess their symptoms and risk, receive personalized guidance on next steps, and stay informed about monitoring their symptoms and proactively managing their health.

To provide as many people as possible with access to high quality medical information and guidance, we’ve built a solution that is free to use around the world. The assessment and screener is available in English, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian, with more languages on the way. In doing so, we aim to help ease some of the immense pressure facing health systems and professionals today and provide valuable support to health organizations around the world.

It’s promising to see how the healthcare and technology industries have joined forces to combat COVID-19. Collaboration has always been fundamental to our approach at Ada, and we’re continuing to work closely with a number of companies to support their healthcare efforts.

We have been pleased to see how positive the response to our screener has been from across the healthcare sector. The screener was developed to be a scalable and globally applicable solution, that could be easily embedded into other platforms and adapted to organizations’ specific needs across the worlds of health and technology. Since launch, a number of organizations have embedded the screener into their digital platforms, giving millions of members and users access to the tool. From medical knowledge sharing platform Figure 1 in Canada, to Axa Egypt and the multinational Samsung Health, organizations around the world are seeing the value in bringing Ada’s assessment to their communities.

By collaborating with organizations such as leading US-based, not-for-profit, integrated healthcare network Sutter Health, we can alleviate some of the pressure facing health organizations and help them to support their communities from home, across the care journey. Technological innovation has a multitude of potential uses and benefits; we’re also working to support the digitization of the COVID-19 testing process at LABOR Berlin, helping to improve overall efficiency of the testing system.

From traditional health systems to testing facilities, we are committed to leveraging the power of technology to support and empower individuals and organizations across the entire ecosystem.

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, companies and industries have stepped up to work together, highlighting a wealth of opportunities for collaboration and transformation across healthcare industries. It has been so encouraging to see this shift, with a huge number of organizations around the world accelerating their adoption of digital health solutions. Attitudes have shifted as we recognize and experience the reality that, together, emerging technologies and traditional healthcare provision can have a hugely powerful impact. We are seeing the power of collaboration every day throughout this crisis, and I believe that healthcare is being positively transformed as a result.

I look forward to a more collaborative future for health and tech, working together to improve access to healthcare. At Ada, we are dedicated to continuing to support individuals and health organizations around the world, to ensure that anyone, anywhere, can access the healthcare they need.