What can local technology communities do to ease this global health crisis?

Even the best-laid plans must be changed when there’s a pandemic on the loose, and folks from all industries are stepping up and supporting those in need — while navigating the devastating blows to their own normal.

You’ve surely noticed that our overall reporting has shifted in the past three weeks to focus almost entirely on COVID-19 news, though still within the parameters of our tech-entrepreneurship-innovation beat. We’ve touched on how local manufacturers are answering the call for personal protective equipment, how to best manage employees and hiring efforts, how small businesses are pivoting to meet new demands and how newly remote workers are getting by at home.

There’s undoubtedly an unprecedented strain on local healthcare systems, though, and we want to tackle it with intention. To account for the current moment, April of Technical.ly’s 2020 editorial calendar is now Healthcare Technologies Month. Accordingly, Community Building Month has been bumped to May 2020. (Global Expansion Month, originally slated for May, is off the digital table indefinitely.)

That means that this April, we’ll be focusing on how the healthcare system is coping with COVID-19 from a technology and innovation perspective. The big question we’ll seek to answer: What can local technology communities do to ease this public health crisis?

Look for stories on how health departments, hospitals, universities, research hubs, health IT startups and more are addressing this global crisis locally, and especially in the realms of testing, supplies, IT infrastructure, security, data, communication, treatment and the like.

Here’s some of the related reporting we’ve done recently:

• How Baltimore’s Insightin Health is applying data and prediction tools to COVID-19 response
• Virginia pathogen-testing company Aperiomics has launched a COVID-19 test
• Philly’s Integral Molecular is researching what makes the COVID-19 virus so infectious
• Delaware BIO launched a virtual coronavirus hub

If you have an idea for a story, or an organization we should look into, or a report we should read, or an expert we should talk to, or if you want to write a guest post on a relevant topic in which you’re an expert, tell us that, too: