Belgium’s government is looking to develop a new application to improve the management of and communication during crises in the country.
It has tasked Frank Robben, the key figure behind the digital architecture of health care and social security systems in Belgium, with developing a new application, according to reports from La Libre Belgique.
“We realised, in fact, that communicating by text message with citizens could only be done within a limit of 140 characters and that could be costly with the telecoms operators,” Robben told the daily.
“When you have 19.6 billion transactions, the cost of exchanges between health care providers and all citizens soon adds up.”
Robben estimated that the new WhatsApp-type application, whose name has not yet been decided, could be ready in two weeks’ time. It will enable public social security bodies to send messages to citizens when the country finds itself facing a crisis, such as the deadly floods in July.
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“These have to be public utility messages linked to health, flood risks or crises like Ukraine,” Robben explained. “Today we have 8.5 million people who have downloaded the CovidSafe app. The idea is to capitalise on this application to create a new one to communicate health information.”
The app will allow the transmission of images, longer texts and even links to videos, at no cost to the user.
