How COVID-19 has accelerated the journey to data-driven health decisions

COVID-19 has highlighted the need to substantially improve disease preparedness to resolve this pandemic and avoid future ones. Digital health and the use of technology at large will be a key contributor to this preparedness. This session talks about how CSIRO has leveraged cloud-native technologies to advance three areas of the COVID-19 response: firstly we worked with GISAID, the largest data resource for the virus causing COVID-19, and use standard health terminologies (FHIR) to help collect clinical patient data. This feeds into a docker-based workflow that creates identifying “fingerprints” of the virus for guiding vaccine developments and investigating whether there are more pathogenic versions of the virus. Secondly, we developed a fully serverless web-service for tailoring diagnostics efforts, capable of differentiating between strains. Thirdly, we are creating a serverless COVID-19 analysis platform that allows distributed genomics and patient data to be shared and analysed in a privacy- and ownership-preserving manner and functioning as an surveillance system for detecting more virulent strains early.

Dr Denis Bauer is CSIRO’s Principal Research Scientist leading the Transformational Bioinformatics group. She is an internationally recognised expert in machine learning and cloud-based genomics, having keynoted AWS Summits (’18), Open Data Science Conference (India, ’18) and International conference on Bioinformatics (Indonesia ‘19). Her achievements include developing open-source machine-learning cloud services that are used by 10,000 researchers and contributing to Australia’s COVID-19 response.