Overview

Countries, states, provinces, hospitals and long term care facilities are under pressure to improve their surveillance and management of infective risk including COVID-19 and multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs).

Besides COVID-19, Bluebird's national tracking system enables real time surveillance of MRSA, VRE, LRE, C Diff, ESBL, CRE, CRAB, CRPA and C.Auris.

Bluebird does this by rapidly integrating data from siloed information systems into a single, cloud-based, secure platform that gives decision-makers a global, real-time view of national and regional data. Local data enables regions to put selective preventative measures into place.

Bluebird tools to help your department manage Special Pathogens

The scaleability and robustness of this cutting edge, cloud based, solution was battle tested during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa where Bluebird provided an emergency service for the National Department of Health which enabled government to gather real-time COVID-19 data from all labs and hospitals in South Africa. This empowered the NDoH to manage and redistribute resources, investigate potential cases and follow up. Bluebird also powered the national Track and Trace system administered by our national TELCO. Unlike systems in many other countries the Bluebird solution never missed a beat.

Bluebird Provides:

• Standardized, real time surveillance of key organisms including COVID-19, CRE and Candida Auris.
• Granular Geolocation of those isolates down to a local level
• Sophisticated data visualization

COVID-19

In March 2020, the South African National Department of Health (NDoH) contracted IMS to use Bluebird as an urgent interim measure until their existing national system could be suitably improved. They also contracted the right to use the Bluebird hospital solution for all hospitals in South Africa. The cloud based Bluebird solution was appealing in this context because of the limited IT capability of many of the public hospitals in South Africa.

Bluebird's COVID-19 National Surveillance System provides a unified platform to actively manage cases and contacts and to intelligently analyze comprehensive data by recording patient demographics, co-morbidities, symptoms and isolation/quarantine decisions as well as the results of testing, Bluebird provides a comprehensive platform to manage:

• individual persons under investigation (PUI)
• confirmed COVID cases
• hospital admissions (the real time PCR results are especially useful in health facilities)
• health-facility staff
• business staff (particularly antibody testing)

Unlike COVID-19 surveillance systems in many other parts of the world, Bluebird performed flawlessly at scale (at the height of the South African first wave Bluebird managed more than 400 000 test results in a single day).

The video and image are part of the Bluebird national dashboard where the rates of infections at across a region are able to be reviewed instantly.

Bluebird can do this across facilities (hospitals, LTCFs) or for the whole population, by region, down to local districts and even voting wards.

More information re: Department of Health Solution
More information re: COVID-19 Hospital Solution for the NDoH

CRE

Carbapenem Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (what the CDC calls Nightmare Bacteria) typically exhibit resistance to almost all available antibiotics, and infection is associated with high morbidity and mortality, increased length of hospital stay, and high costs.

Traditional infection control strategies that target monitoring of clinical isolates as a trigger for initiating control interventions have not proved effective for CRE because they only address the "tip of the iceberg" - there are about 100 colonized patients for every infected patient. It is important to identify CRE patients prior to hospital admission and this is only possible with a national tracking system such as Bluebird.

Other MDROs

Besides CRE, Bluebird's national tracking system enables real time surveillance of MRSA, VRE, LRE, C Diff, ESBL ,CRE, CRAB, CRPA and C.Auris. The latter, in particular is now, like CRE, a global threat.

HIV, Tuberculosis

In parts of the world where HIV and TB is a major public health problem Bluebird's national tracking system is a tool that can save time and help save lives.