Data Transparency Helps Filipinos Fight COVID-19 Better
One of the biggest challenges in vaccination is having a holistic view of its progress. Easy if you’re an island state or landlocked. But for the Philippines, with its archipelago of 7,640 islands, monitoring progress can be a challenge.
So the Philippine’s Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) tied up with local analytics company Intellection and data cloud giant Snowflake. Together, they created a single unified view of vaccine data supporting the Philippine government’s mass vaccination program.
The collaboration began in March 2021, and to date, the platform, built by Intellection and powered by Snowflake, has processed 95 million vaccine records and 500,000 input files coming from 8,100 local government units (LGUs) with zero maintenance staff, zero downtime, and a 24x7 operation that is fully automated.
The transparency eased importing, distributing, administering, and monitoring vaccines in 81 provinces, 146 cities, 1,500 municipalities, and 42,046 barangays across the archipelago.
“This has undoubtedly been a key factor in the administration of 59 million doses to 40 million individuals so far. The data in Snowflake’s Data Cloud also powers the Department of Health’s (DoH) Vaccine Certificate Portal (VaxCertPH), which enables vaccinated Filipinos to officially certify their vaccinations online,” said Sonny Halili, chief executive officer of Intellection.
From the onset, DICT was under time pressure. Filipinos were asked to register and submit the necessary data to their LGUs. With Intellection and Snowflake, DICT could configure and build a repository data warehouse within one week.
According to Rafael Halili, Intellection's data science director, “The DICT needed a data consolidation platform that is secure, efficient, reliable, and can be set up in a very short period of time with very limited technical resources and running 24x7. Using Snowflake’s Data Cloud, Intellection delivered all the requirements – setup, configuration, design, data ingestion programs and automated feeds from thousands of LGU’s in one-fifth of the time allotted.”
This became crucial when the Philippines raised its vaccination target from 70% to 90% of the population to attain herd immunity in September 2021. This was done to stem the hike of the country's highly transmissible Delta variant cases.
Through the collaboration with DICT, Snowflake and Intellection helped the country fulfil its vaccination goals. It provided them with a quicker and more efficient platform that enables officials to manage and optimize the vaccination process.
“With our high-performance cloud platform, LGUs are ready to process the incoming vaccine deliveries and administer them to the population with sufficient time before vaccine arrival. It also enables pandemic officials to make better data-driven business decisions in near-real-time response to the unpredictable impact of the pandemic,” added Geoff Soon, senior district manager for ASEAN at Snowflake.
So it is no surprise that Snowflake awarded DICT with a Data for Good award at its annual Snowflake Data Drivers Awards. The award recognized the organization for leveraging enhanced data analytics to make informed decisions to save, extend, and improve lives and the environment.
Image credit: iStockphoto/John Kevin
