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A series of emails sent from last March onwards, among officials of the Ministry of Health, clearly demonstrate that the system Epivigila, since its implementation, maintained serious mistakes of operation.
The main problems would have been in the “infectious disease registry monitoring software”, which it would not have allowed to maintain a clear registry of those infected by covid-19.
It can even be established that on Tuesday, March 24, they recognized that they had not been able to download the data from the platform for 48 hours.
According to the same emails, on Wednesday, March 25, there is already talk of the need to apply sanctions to the technology provider, which is the University of Valparaíso, a situation that was known to the main authorities of the Ministry of Health (Minsal), including Jaime Mañalich and Paula Daza.
Meanwhile, officials from the Epidemiology Department of the Sanitary Planning Division of the Undersecretariat of Public Health who had detected that the “Reveno-EPIVIGILA” software did not comply with the provisions of the agreement signed during the month of August 2019, already that did not allow continuous monitoring of the progress of the pandemic in Chile. The emails are revealed by the Research Unit of Radio Bío Bío.
Details
On Tuesday, March 24, the country registered 922 positive cases of Covid-19. Of these, 176 were new cases. The pandemic still had more questions than answers, but the latter were not solved by the authorities of the Ministry of Health (Minsal), who continued to seek the formula to establish a mechanism to count positive cases of coronavirus.
In that period, the President Sebastian Piñera He argued in interviews with the media that our country was “better prepared” than Italy, a nation hard hit by the virus. But the truth is that -apparently- everything was progressing in an improvised way. One of them was the Epivigila system, which although it was not created for the contingency of Covid-19, was not working as promised.
In the emails accessed by the Radio Bío Bío Research Unit, it is possible to note that since March 6, the Covid-19 case counting system via Epivigila had flaws. Proof of this is a message sent on March 24 by Johanna Acevedo, former head of the Department of Epidemiology at Minsal, to the then Minister Mañalich, in which it warns you of problems of the Epivigila system.
“Dear Minister: Faced with the contingency that we have for CORONAVIRUS, I need TICs to understand the priority and urgency of this project (Epivigila),” he wrote. Next, Acevedo began to detail the problems detected at that point: “The platform is NOT in high availability (It has restrictive parameters), as we requested it months ago, which affects system blinks or sticks when there are many users at the same time or notifications are not saved correctly. Yesterday, in fact, it was down for 2 continuous hours in the morning ”,
He also emphasized that there were restrictions on downloading the information, realizing that on the date the email was sent, it had been “48 hours without being able to download the database.” To this is added that he warned that the “Ministerial postal platform has also failed, which affects the alert emails against new notifications or that MINSAL emails do not reach the recipients.”
But that is not all. The failures noted by Acevedo were recognized by Minsal. Carmen Gloria Chacana, who at that time served as head of the Information and Communication Technologies department, responded to Acevedo’s questions. In the reply email, the Minsal official tells him that “the problems presented by the system have a single cause: problems in the software code.” And he added that “these antecedents have been timely reported to the Epidemiology Department team and the Provider. Evidence of this is that since March 6 we have the following version change history that the supplier has had to correct ”, he replied.
Strikethrough Mail
In addition to the above, Chacana wrote to Acevedo that “other problems detected in the Software are in the field of Security. We have agreed with the Computer Security Incident Response Team of the Ministry of the Interior, to include it in its permanent Monitoring as other critical MINSAL applications, and for each version change, Vulnerability Analysis will be requested from the CSIRT ”.
That same Tuesday, March 24, at 6:20 p.m., in another e-mail, Carmen Gloria Chacana herself notified Johanna Acevedo that as a result of the problems detected in Epivigila, the application of a fine to the provider -the University Valparaíso- and that a technical report was being prepared to argue the application of the sanction.
After an hour, Acevedo replied to Carmen Gloria Chacana: “I am waiting for the error report to determine responsibilities, it has not been clear to me in all these months of work that errors are 100% responsibility of Software ”.
The following day, as noted in the emails, Johanna Acevedo received the report from TICs. Given this, he wrote on Wednesday, March 25, at 8:52 p.m., to the head of the Information and Communication Technologies department: “Thank you very much for the report, I will give instructions for the supplier to make all the ASAP improvements, on the credentials these have already been restored ”. That Wednesday 1,142 new cases of Covid-19 were counted, 220 more than the previous day.
On Friday, March 27, according to the emails, Chacana wrote to Acevedo to request his help in applying sanctions to the provider for system failures. For this, he asked the former head of the Epidemiology Department to send him a report of Epivigila’s errors. In response to the request, Johanna Acevedo replied to Carmen Gloria that they had a heavy workload, and that beyond the financial penalty, she requested the collaboration of TICs “to resolve any incident as soon as possible in order to keep the notification that is a key input for the authority to make informed decisions ”.
In addition to the above, Johanna Acevedo, in her reply, made a strong questioning of the quality control of the Epivigila system, which pointed directly to the ICT area.
“I am struck by the fact that the product has repeatedly passed through different quality controls in ICTs (…) and the steps to production that are sanctioned by a committee of your department with which we have repeatedly iterated for actually finding any it fails or because as clients we have requested changes in its development ”, he replied.
What is Epivigila?
During 2019 the Ministry of Health signed an agreement with the University of Valparaíso. The idea was to create software that helps the authorities of the Epidemiology Department of the Health Planning Division of the Undersecretariat of Public Health to have online records on infectious diseases.
For its operation, it was established that the doctors of the different health centers must enter the data into Epivigila. To do this, they must access the platform -from any device connected to the Internet-, having a personal password and completing the information requested in an online form.
However, last March the Epivigila entered into operations, detecting the managers a series of serious problems that did not allow continuous monitoringTherefore, the decision would have been made to return to the manual or old system, that is, covering the statistics by hand via daily calls to the health services to inform them about the numbers they kept.
On July 13, the Comptroller General of the Republic evacuated a report in which it ordered an administrative summary after finding errors in the figures of infections reported by the Health authority and that were stored on the Epivigila platform.
According to those familiar with the operation, this was determined to avoid having substantive differences with what EPIVIGILA reported at the time, as it was not safe to rely on the REVENO software figures. This was proven in the email sent by Jhanna Acevedo to Jaime Mañalich, as explained above.
Prosecutor’s office
Emails that are known just when the Prosecutor’s Office seeks to access the messages that it sent to the then Minister of Health, Jaime Mañalich, and in which it aims establish if there was data manipulation by the authorities in the management of the pandemic.
In the emails between officials of the Ministry of Health, including Mañalich, it can be seen that during the month of March there was no trust whatsoever in the Epivigila system, which is why they would have returned to the old mechanism, that is, manually filling out files.
It should be noted that there was no public statement in March in which the authorities acknowledged in their speeches the serious problems that the system was maintaining. In fact, in May when some doctors complained on social networks about problems on the Epivigila platform It was never clarified what happened and why the system was “stuck”.
In fact, the Undersecretary of Public Health, Paula Daza, on more than one occasion defended the system in question since she said that “previously, all reports of mandatory notifiable diseases were made through a more manual circumstance, therefore Therefore, Epivigila has allowed us to have more timely information and find errors and rectify when necessary ”, as stated in an Emol publication on July 14.
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