14 April 2020 – Digital medical assistant released for Croatians on WhatApp to educate and assist

Type of Intervention: New Tool / Service / Body
Sectors Involved: Health, Research and Development
Intervention Categories: Legal and policy; New initiatives
Level of Jurisdiction: National
Lead People/Agency: Ministry of Public Administration (as part of the larger project of the digitalization of public administration). The project team: epidemiologist Professor Branko Kolarić; technical/IT development: local IT companies Mindsmiths, Neos and Oracle Hrvatska; Infobip, member of the Croatian Association for Artificial Intelligence (Hrvatska udruga za umjetnu inteligenciju CroAI; Robert Bednarski for WhatsApp Central and East Europe.

Overview: Digital assistant Andrija (named after the Croatian public health physician and the first president of the World Health Assembly that constituted WHO in 1946) accessible via WhatsApp, designed to educate and help communicate (and relieve pressure on) with healthcare providers.
Full details here: https://andrija.ai/

Other links: 1
Type of Justification: Learning from other jurisdictions
Source of Evidence or Justification: International – government
Evidence/Justification: Quote from the lead epidemiologist Branko Kolaric: “Countries that had the most successful response to the pandemic in its early stages, such as South Korea and Singapore, used digital technologies to communicate individually with their citizens”