27. An Information Management System for the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Blockchain

During the 1st Semester of 2020, 25 students from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica – ITA) in São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil developed the academic project “Specific Technological Solutions for Special Patients with Big Data”, in Portuguese Projeto STEPES-BD: Soluções Tecnológicas Específicas para Pacientes Especiais e Sistemas em Bancos de Dados. They have accepted the challenge of using a technological approach to help manage and combat the Sars-CoV-2 Virus Pandemic (COVID-19). At that time, the lack of shared data between public and private agencies and the need for faster information flow were considered the main information for combating the spread of the disease to guide the development of an Information Management System for the COVID-19 Pandemic, involving the essential data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The combination of some emerging technologies like Big Data and Blockchain, together with the Scrum Framework (SF) and the Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning (IPBL) enabled those students from three different academic courses to develop a computer system prototype based on the pressing needs caused by this disease. This article describes the development of the main deliverables made by those graduate students in just 17 academic weeks right from the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic crisis in the 1st Semester of 2020.