Covid-19: UAE's critical patients' data to be stored in global critical care consortium

The data from hundreds of Covid-19 patients admitted to the ICUs of UAE hospitals have gone into an international critical care consortium. This will help doctors around the world make crucial decisions on patient care.

Top healthcare institutions in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are part of the 'Covid-19 Critical Care Consortium' that connects 380 hospitals from 58 countries.

With 35 million data points, the consortium is the world's most in-depth database of critically ill Covid-19 patients.

Professor John Fraser, an intensivist and anaesthesiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, created and now drives the consortium. Millions of data points available at the fingertips of clinicians across the world can help frontliners understand the best way to treat critically ill Covid-19 patients, he said.

"Data is the new oil. When Covid-19 created geographical boundaries, people could not travel, but data could. The dashboard we created empowered clinicians with raw observational data that they could rely on as they decide on critical treatment," Fraser told Khaleej Times in an exclusive interview.

He said the consortium was born out of the medical fraternity's need to 'put the jigsaw puzzle together' when the virus emerged in Wuhan in early 2020.

It all began when a doctor from China and a few other Asian doctors — who were part of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation, of which Fraser is the president — started talking about "something funny in Wuhan", he said.

"The messages became more frequent, and we were flustered. People were dying. They said things that they do for intensive care patients with lung conditions weren't working. The intensive care community was the last line of defence. And we had no instruction manual. There was no vaccine. There was no treatment, no guidance. We could only help by sharing ideas," said Fraser, the founder and director of the Critical Care Research Group at The Prince Charles Hospital and The University of Queensland.

Doctors from five to 10 hospitals began meeting over Zoom calls every Friday after their shift, sharing observational data and their experiences of handling critically ill patients.

"We were up to 250 hospitals. As the group organically got bigger and bigger, we decided to form a dashboard and bring the global data together electronically."

Instead of publishing manuscripts and papers that can be time-consuming, Fraser said they wanted to offer easy access to data for clinical colleagues around the world.

"Initially, the dashboard had data of 2,000 ICU patients that doctors could look into. Then it just grew and grew and grew. (Now, we have) almost 20,000 patients with every single piece of ICU data, their oxygen levels, their kidney function, their heart function, their liver function, their ventilation."

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The largest-ever database, created by grassroots clinicians covering rich and poor countries, also helped democratise data-sharing, the professor said.

The UAE and Qatar alone have shared the data of over 2,000 patients, he added.

"The Emirates and the Gulf have been an incredibly important part of the creation of this global family. The data will help the GCC deal with future pandemics better," Fraser said.

"What we have learnt from the massive amount of data collected will help countries prevent and fight future pandemics. The data we have can be given straight to the hands of clinicians — not six months too late, but immediately. Whether it is treating heart diseases or lung conditions, we hopefully have already helped the clinicians around the globe."

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