The major concern of global health agencies with the new coronavirus (COVID-19) is not to overburden hospitals and health systems that provide care to patients. With that in mind, health experts and the company Pixit came together to create a solution that could use technology to help the lives of Brazilians: the CoronaBr website (www.coronabr.com.br), which relies on IBM's public cloud infrastructure to meet all access demands. In less than a month since its launch, the portal reached more than 20 million hits and was the link most shared by WhatsApp in the period from 17 to 24 March, according to a survey by the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
The virtual nurse "Pedro do CoronaBr", based on clinical diagnostic scripts (tele-guidance in cases of self-limited symptoms), asks questions and uses warning signs based on the indicated symptoms. This allows a screening of patients to qualify those who need medical care or to indicate cases in which the recommendation is not medication, giving guidance to those with symptoms who could stay at home. The site is completely free and asks the first questions that a nurse would ask in a hospital screening, based on the protocol followed by the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health.
Launched on March 19, the platform exceeded 1 million accesses in 24 hours and 3 million in 48 hours. This rapid increase in the number of accesses required an infrastructure capable of growing as quickly as public interest, as well as a stable platform capable of delivering a complete experience for its visitors. For this, the creators of CoronaBr counted on IBM to have the necessary support to provide the necessary conditions to enhance the impact of the portal.
CoronaBr joined the Startup with IBM program to gain access to business mentoring and technical resources to continue supporting the population. The entire architecture has been redesigned so that the portal gains in scalability and stability to support peak accesses, ensuring the availability of the service for users. Startup With IBM is a global program that aims to support entrepreneurs and startups through access to infrastructure and services in IBM's public cloud, which can reach values of up to US$ 120,000 per year in credits. These credits can be used to access 130 services available on the IBM Cloud, including IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, Analytics and Security.
"When the discussion about the risk of the health system becoming overloaded began, we saw that we needed to do something, we wanted to use technology and our ability to help solve this problem. At this critical moment, the idea was to aggregate, to solve. CoronaBr was born, which has been helping thousands of Brazilians every day with free online guidance that avoids unnecessary visits to a health unit ", said Flávio Machado, co-responsible for the creation of CoronaBr. With the environment running on IBM's public cloud, CoronaBr can support up to 184 thousand accesses per hour, or 4.5 million accesses per day, giving stability to the system and reaching even more people. The platform has the capacity to support even more users and grow, as accesses grow throughout the day.
"Our first interest was to keep CoronaBr available to the population regardless of the large volume of accesses. To do this, we used IBM's public cloud, which ensured the necessary scalability for the application. This brings peace of mind to the CoronaBr team for that can plan the next steps and the expansion of the portal at the same time that they are able to serve site visitors with security and stability ", comments Marcos Paraíso, public cloud executive at IBM Brazil.
About CoronaBr
It is a digital platform for guidance on the new coronavirus in which Pedro's avatar, a virtual nurse, interacts with the user following an algorithm, developed according to the most advanced medical guidelines and in line with the guidelines of the Ministry of Health. an initiative by Pixit Digital Solutions with the Axonn Health Tech and with the collaboration of infectious disease physician Lucas Chaves. CoronaBr is a social service provision that offers free explanations to the population on how to prevent and eventually treat themselves in case of contagion.
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