The Task

All clinics in Lower Austria are obliged to submit their COVID-19 case numbers, information on resource utilisation and escalation issues to the State Health Agency at predetermined times. All messages and changes must be logged for traceability. The time raster should be flexible depending on the escalation level.

The reports are to be checked for plausibility and aggregated in a status report, which serves as the basis for the crisis staff meeting of the Lower Austrian State Health Agency. The data are important for model calculations of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the basis for the daily reporting to the federal government. In addition, the reports based on them are central guidance variables for the management of the crisis unit.

In order to quickly relieve the affected departments, the platform was required to be put into operation as soon as possible, but in compliance with strict quality requirements. In an intensive dialogue with the users, various implementation variants for efficient implementation were discussed. „Together, we have developed a simple, scalable solution,“ says Thomas Kuhta, Senior Principal Consultant at RUBICON. „We are pleased to be able to implement such an important project for our health system.“

The solution

The online reporting system is based on Acta Nova. The front end for the registration of hospitals and nursing centres is based on ASP.NET MVC and does not need its own database. It uses Acta Nova‘s authentication, whereby communication to Acta Nova is via a custom REST API.

Reporting frontend

Excel templates are available for download for the registrations. Furthermore, the system indicates the reporting deadlines – up to which time uploads (even multiple times) can be made. As a user can upload reports for multiple sites, the first step is the selection of the location.

Acta Nova as a backend

The creation and approval of the Excel templates as well as the management of the locations and users takes place in the backend system. The customising which was necessary to meet the special requirements was carried out via specialist data fields. The reports are filed in a multi-stage organisation system: Starting out from the process area “Forms” they move on to a separate subject area for each type of form. The individual reports are always assigned to a location and end up as an input piece in the respective file. Multiply uploaded reports receive version numbers. The most up-to-date version always counts for the evaluation. The reporting database is filled via a parser service that reads the data from the form sheets. The evaluations are implemented in Acta Nova, which accesses the evaluation database via a proxy object.

Successful Start

The COVID-19 online reporting system has gone live state-wide on 13 May 2020. All 27 clinics of the Lower Austrian State Health Agency have uploaded their reports via the platform for the first time by the scheduled reporting deadline. Immediately afterwards, the headquarters aggregated the data via the backend and generated the report for the subsequent crisis staff meeting.

A total of around 100 users have already been registered in the system. Due to the intuitive and simple use, a high acceptance level was achieved among the users. In the future, also laboratory institutes will use the system to upload information about laboratory tests.