Nicolai Savaskan, until recently head of the Neukölln Health Department, on preparations for the fall pandemic, digital reporting and open source.
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“After more than two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still facing the same data management challenges as before the pandemic. In general, authorities, offices and public institutions are digitally removed from the general standards of their citizens and the organizational and efficiency structures in their Maturity seems obsolete.” With this skepticism, the Berlin practitioners Mesut Yavuz and Nicolai Savaskan from the public health service (ÖGD) begin an article about its “long road to digitization”.
“Missing Link”
What is missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often time to re-sort all the news and background information. At the weekend we want to take it, follow the side paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.
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More on the features section “Missing Link”
“In the eye of the storm”
In order to get to the bottom of the state of affairs, voonze online author Stefan Krempl exchanged views with Savaskan about the experiences of the past few years and the work in a relevant authority “in the eye of the storm”. dr medical habil. Savaskan is a board member of the Association of Physicians in the Public Health Service of the States of Brandenburg and Berlin (VÄöGD). In his day-to-day work, he was head of the Neukölln health department until recently, but was relieved of this task at the end of July after arguments with the city councilor for health, Mirjam Blumenthal (SPD). In the “hotspot district,” an intercultural team that speaks 13 foreign languages has been campaigning for vaccinations for the past few months.
Savaskan is considered unconventional. In his early 50s, observers describe the epidemiologist as the opposite of the cliché of the ruined and dusty public health system. In his previous office in Neukölln, red boxing gloves hung on the cupboard because assertiveness is also required in administration. A scooter was always at hand. In a portrait of him it says: “He is busy, eloquent, factual, always available and often two or three steps ahead in his head.” For example, the doctor is promoting an open source platform for the ÖGD in order to finally end the current software misery.
The jokes almost wrote themselves
The jokes about the ÖGD almost wrote themselves at the start of the corona pandemic: The FDP member of the Bundestag Hagen Reinhold, for example, spoke at the beginning of 2021 of a “disaster” that most health authorities “in the corona crisis continued only by fax and paper money”. communicated. This programmed the collapse of contact tracing in many federal states.
The federal and state governments had previously decided on a “Pact for the Public Health Service” in autumn 2020. They wanted to create “interoperability across all levels” and speed up the reporting system. According to the federal government’s plan, by the end of 2020, 90 percent of the 380 health authorities in Germany should use the “Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System” (Sormas), which the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig developed to fight Ebola and Added a Sars-Cov-2-specific module in 2019.
With 111 of the authorities at the turn of the year 2020, it was only around two thirds. According to an analysis by the German Association of Cities and Districts, a significant proportion of the health authorities used Microsoft Excel or in-house developments such as Survnet, Octoware, ISGA, Miropro and Unisoft for contact person management.
A kind of “degitalization”
That has now changed. At the end of March 2021, 315 health authorities were able to access Sormas, at least in principle. Since February, the extended Sormas-X solution has also been used with interfaces to Survnet and the German electronic reporting and information system for infection protection (Demis) in a first office, the government said at the time. Corresponding extensions would be rolled out successively.
“In many places we have long since passed the stage of files that are pushed back and forth or endless faxes that accumulate due to corona cases,” concludes IT expert Bianca Kastl, who works in public health. Nevertheless, at the same time there is a kind of “degitalization”. Three different digital systems are involved in the reporting chain for corona cases alone, at the end of which the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) issues values for the 7-day incidence: one for laboratory reports, a specialist application for the office and the reporting software Survnet. Between the three solutions, a lot of manual work is required to sort and forward messages and data. An actually digitized process, from which, despite a lot of personnel expenditure, no real-time picture of the situation arises.
Savaskan knows these challenges and many others in the ÖGD. Here are his assessments and demands for the expected hot summer, autumn and winter of the pandemic, which is constantly being driven by new variants.
