An Army medic prepares a simulated casualty for treatment during Operation Courageous Fury, a joint training exercise designed to assess medical operations in Germany at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, June 3, 2021 (Photo by: Marcy Sanchez, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center).
Communication
Communications underwent significant changes during the pandemic and became more open and transparent.
Canada's Bilodeau said "we totally changed our approach regarding using social media through the pandemic."
"Instead of staying away from it before, we are using it to communicate even with those internal to our organization."
To do so, Canada created a "fusion center helping to triage the information and make sure that it was digestible for us as medical advisers."
Similarly, in the U.K., there was a new openness about information. "Modeling was quite often exposed for all to see," Wilson said.
A lot of governmental-level decisions were based on modeling, Wilson said. Briefings included slides showing: "What if we put these measures in place? What if we don't put these measures in place? So some of that modeling became quite public property," he said.
Modeling and simulation
Modeling and simulation allowed the Canadian public health services to build new partnerships with defense scientists. Modeling and simulation also "challenges us to invest in data analytics, and computing power as well, because modeling requires a lot of computing power that we didn't have at the start of the pandemic," Bilodeau said.
He challenged the international community to "invest in technology that will be compatible with each other, so that we can share some of our database or give access to our databases."
"The more we develop that ability to share data, and ultimately to build modeling that won't be country-specific modeling, but region-specific modeling or even planet modeling, that will help us being better prepared for the next step."
Data Management
The U.S. military created a good system of tracking cases, care delivered, vaccinations, administered and many other metrics, Place said. "But we were drawing from multiple databases and systems, and there were times when data wasn't timely, and it wasn't accurate. We need to do better there," he said.
DHA Deputy Assistant Director for Medical Affairs Dr. Paul Cordts added: "I think we've come a long way in the last two years on integrating our data sources to be able to provide answers very rapidly to our most senior leaders."