From Strategic Planning to Tackling Pandemics

COVID-19 has led to the world's largest virus-induced crisis in recent decades. Like many other countries, Austria was inadequately prepared for a pandemic in some areas. The pandemic management was therefore in most respects reactive instead of pro-active. This led to measures that were sometimes difficult for the population to understand. The need for a clear-cut pandemic management plan that includes feasible recommendations for decision-makers was already evident in early stages of the pandemic. ROADS to Health aims to work out a holistic, technologically supported system that draws onto lessons learned from the COVID-19 outbreak to tackle future epidemics and pandemics that provides adequate decisions at all times.
The objectives of ROADS to Health concentrate on generating the basis for situation-based measure matching in an infection scenario, or more precisely, in an epidemic or pandemic outbreak. Different aspects of the project include project management, requirements and scenarios, measures, tool conceptioning, testing and validation.
In the initial project phase, the focus of ROADS lies upon working out certain impacts of bundles of measures that were set over the last years and how they align with strategic aims in pandemic management. The requirements and scenarios that are of utmost importance for the project and are based on background analysis of pandemic parameters, baseline studies, cataloguing and assessment of current practices.
It posed to be difficult to match broad strategic aims with specific means and measures, since the former are not communicated publicly by decision-makers. Another challenge hereby was that various organisations, communities, etc. may have different (underlying) strategic plans behind their reasoning for actions.
Hence, our multi-disciplinary team is currently working out categorisations of measures and parameters within pandemic management that can ultimately be traced back to strategic objectives, which dictate the overarching direction decision-makers want to head towards in tackling a pandemic outbreak.