Data of hundreds of COVID-19 patients admitted to ICUs in UAE hospitals has been sent to an international critical care consortium. The data will help doctors from across the world in making crucial decisions on patient care. The 'Covid-19 Critical Care Consortium' connects 380 hospitals and top healthcare institutions from 58 countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. The consortium has 35 million data points, making it the world's most in-depth database of critically ill COVID-19 patients.

Professor John Fraser, intensivist and anaesthesiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, developed the consortium. He is currently driving millions of data points from clinicians across the world to help frontliners understand the best possible way to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients.

"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 said.

In an exclusive interview with the Khaleej Times, he explained that the consortium was developed to fulfill the needs of the medical fraternity to effectively tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in the world.

The process of the consortium began when a doctor from China and a few other Asian doctors (part of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation presided by Fraser) were discussing about the events taking place in Wuhan.

"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," explained Fraser, the founder and director of the Critical Care Research Group at The Prince Charles Hospital and The University of Queensland.

Later, doctors from several hospitals began meeting over Zoom calls every Friday after their shift to share observational data and their experiences of handling critically ill patients. The number of hospitals rose to 250 and the group organically got bigger and bigger, the doctor highlighted. Then, the officials decided to form a dashboard and bring the global data together electronically.

Fraser said that instead of publishing manuscripts and papers which would be time-consuming, doctors decided to develop an easy-to-access tool 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," Fraser noted.

Created by grassroots clinicians from both rich and poor countries, the largest-ever database has also helped in democratising data-sharing, the professor added. He pointed out that the UAE and Qatar alone have shared the data of over 2,000 patients.

He hailed the Emirates and the Gulf for showing incredible participation in the creation of the global database to help the region in better handling future pandemics.

"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. Whether it is treating heart diseases or lung conditions, we hopefully have already helped the clinicians around the globe," he added.