Real-time data will be key to Australia’s vaccine rollout

Nutanix managing director Lee Thompson. Source: Supplied.

One of the biggest economic issues COVID-19 has highlighted is the complexity – and fragility – of supply chains. Critically, this complexity is not just limited to the movement of international goods as state border closures and hotspot declarations place strains on domestic supply chains.

But this economic challenge could become a major health issue as Australia prepares to roll out COVID-19 vaccines – and IT is set to play a major logistic role in ensuring vaccine distribution is smart, efficient, and effective.

Healthcare and the pandemic’s digital switch

COVID-19 hasn’t just put healthcare providers at the centre of public consciousness; it has also highlighted the pressing need for digital transformation in the sector.

Recent research Nutanix conducted found more than two-thirds (70 per cent) of healthcare organisations said COVID-19 had caused IT to be viewed more strategically and more than half had invested in additional hybrid cloud capabilities last year.

The added flexibility hybrid cloud gives these organisations allows them to face the switch to telehealth consultations with confidence while setting the foundation for a new wave of innovation and untapped potential in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and robotics, all of which are likely to play an increasing role in the future of healthcare.

More immediately, however, overhauling previously ‘dumb’ legacy infrastructure with smarter private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure greatly improves the productivity of frontline staff – and the IT team who support them – while freeing up resources to be invested into patient care.

Australian aged care provider, Whiddon, is a perfect example of how to leverage next-generation infrastructure to improve operations. It recently implemented a private cloud to replace its legacy infrastructure and the results have included a 50 per cent reduction in power consumption – resources that can be redirected to frontline services – as well as greatly improving business performance with IT processes that once required two hours now being reduced to just 30 seconds.

This frees the IT team to focus on innovative projects that can improve resident care and deploy modern applications to further support nurses and care givers.

While these benefits are at a comparatively smaller scale than the national vaccine rollout, there are important lessons to be learned in how a more robust digital infrastructure is essential to enhancing the management of the industry’s people, patients, assets, and facilities during one of the largest medical operations in Australian history.

Readying IT systems for the vaccine rollout

Technology will play a critical role in helping ensure vaccines are first delivered to those who need it most – the vulnerable and the frontline workers.

Once inoculations commence, the Government has aimed to vaccinate 80,000 Australians per week. During a recent National Press Club address, it was affirmed that all Australians will have the opportunity to be vaccinated via general practitioners and pharmacists by October 2021.

Achieving this will ultimately require the bridging of multiple data sources that provide supply chain visibility and demand forecasting, supporting the transportation of critical doses to millions of Australians safely and efficiently.

Another challenge is the fact that all the current vaccine candidates – including the AstraZeneca/Oxford and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines – require two rounds of inoculation for them to be effective.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates more than half of the world’s vaccines go to waste every year simply due to mishandled data in the supply chain, such as temperature control, shipment location, and timing issues.

And of the vaccines to be distributed in 2021, the first cab-off-the-rank is probably the most difficult to transport, with Pfizer’s vaccine requiring an ultra-cold-chain of -70C.

Meeting the Government’s target of immunising a minimum 80 per cent of the nation (the threshold for herd immunity) by October would not be possible without the transformation we’ve seen in IT and cloud computing in the past decade.

Australia currently ranks second on The Software Alliance’s global cloud computing scorecard, buoyed by the Government’s inclusion of cloud computing issues in its laws, regulations and standards. Other countries with operational data sitting on an engine built for decades gone, the old computing room, may not be so successful.

In a country where ice cream melts in the shade, executing our vaccine plan requires military-like precision. Technology, and the intelligent systems which support it, will be at the core of safeguarding the vaccine’s integrity and accelerating the most critical healthcare project of our time.

Lee Thompson is Managing Director Australia and New Zealand for enterprise cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure company Nutanix