On 28 March the Official State Gazette published the Order SND/297/2020 in which the Ministry of Health instructed the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation to develop different actions in the digital and statistical field to manage the health crisis caused by COVID-19 (hereinafter the "Order"). These measures are as follows:

1.- The development of technological solutions and mobile applications for data collection to improve the operational efficiency of health services, as well as better care and accessibility by citizens. This is intended to avoid the dissemination of misinformation and to lighten the burden on the emergency services.

Mobile applications should allow users to perform self-assessments based on the symptoms they report, provide them with information on the probability of being infected, and provide advice and recommendations based on what they have reported. The Order clarifies that they shall not constitute "a medical diagnostic service, an emergency care service or a drug treatment prescription service”.

In addition to the above, it mandates the development of a "chat/ conversational assistant to be used by WhatsApp and other instant messaging applications" and an informative website containing the technology resources available.

2.- The implementation of a study of mobility applied to the health crisis ("DataCovid19").

This is probably the most controversial measure of all those contemplated in the Order. The Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation will be responsible for carrying out a study on the mobility of people in the days prior to and during confinement. This work will follow the model used last November by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (hereinafter, "INE") in its analysis of population mobility, based on aggregated and anonymized information provided by mobile phone operators.

According to the Order, "the aim is to have real information on people's mobility in the days before and during confinement. The objective is to understand the population movements to see how large the health capacities are in each region".

The Order expressly determines that the person responsible for the data will be the INE and the people in charge will be the mobile electronic communications operators.

3.- The creation of a central coordination point for the evaluation of other technological proposals by different bodies and entities. This task is also entrusted to the Secretariat of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.

The Order highlights that the above provisions must comply with European and Spanish data protection regulations, as well as with the interpretative criteria given by the Spanish Data Protection Agency.

The full text of the Order is available here [1].