Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Bui The Duy reported that immediately after the first Covid-19 cases were detected in Vietnam, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam requested that the Ministries of Health, Information & Communications, Science & Technology as well as experts in the fields to create useful technological tools to contribute to the fight against the disease.
Therefore, at the earliest stage of this fourth Covid-19 outbreak in Vietnam, domestic technological companies quickly developed useful software to detect infected people and track their contacts or to monitor illegal entrance into Vietnam at border regions.
One such prominent application is Bluezone, downloaded over 40 million times and regularly used by 25 million people nationwide. It has been able to deliver around 700,000 Covid-19 test results to users.
Health declaration has attracted much attention of the public as a mandatory procedure during the pandemic. Many functional agencies have cooperated to exploit AI technologies to collect real-time data from difference pieces of declaration software and then integrate them for better monitoring of infected or quarantined individuals, people coming from other countries.
Lately, the app ‘So Suc Khoe Dien Tu’ has been introduced by the Health Ministry to manage Covid-19 vaccination information of all citizens, or the function ‘Zalo Connect’ has been introduced for benefactors to help the needy in their neighborhoods during the social distance period in various regions in Vietnam. These apps use both AI and Big Data technologies.
The advanced technologies above are also exploited by scientists to develop patterns of pandemic spreading, to evaluate the risk level of each area, and to forecast potential disease hot spots.
On the way to implement the digital transformation process in the medical field, AI has been used effectively. For instance, the platform for distance medical diagnosis and treatment provision named ‘Telehealth’ was launched around a year ago. It links local clinics of all districts in Vietnam so that experienced doctors can aid their colleagues in grassroots level to better treat patients in their local areas.
Over 600 diagnosis sessions and 200 training sessions were held on this platform to treat more than 1,600 cases. There were also 120 special diagnosis sessions to treat severe cases of Covid-19 to timely help over 1,800 patients to safely recover from the serious state.
‘Telehealth’ is highly appreciated by the whole medical staff as an innovative and extremely useful technological tool to minimize deaths in the fight against Covid-19, reduce the workload in high-leveled field hospitals, decrease direct contact between doctors and patients, and let grassroots-leveled doctors feel more confident thanks to the continuous help from their seniors.
It is planned that the National Technological Center for Covid-19 Prevention and Control will maintain the service of this common platform in the whole country to better satisfy the consultation need of local doctors. The Center will also keep using popular technologies in pandemic prevention and control tasks like declaring health, monitoring entrance to and exit from public places, tracking infection, performing quick tests, vaccinating citizens, monitoring quarantined people, and calculating the social distance level.
These technologies will form a special network to be introduced to all localities for the sake of consistency stability.
In the upcoming time, based on AI technologies, Vietnam is going to offer a vaccine passport to all citizens after the vaccination campaign finishes and electronic health reports are issued to all people.
