Moving at the Speed of the Pandemic: Developing a Tool to Allow our College to Open Safely
In Summer 2020, our college wanted to return to in-person classes for Fall of 2020 but it was important that this was done in a safe way. To accomplish this, they needed tools for understanding who had positive COVID cases, who they had interacted with, where they were on campus, and overall impact to the college. My team was asked to build technology to support this, due to our ability to quickly develop custom software in Oracle APEX.
Over the course of four weeks, we designed a UI and functionality for this tool. It was intense but we were motivated by the notion of providing these key functionality to help our college operate.
Self Reporting & Case Management
Any individual who has been on one of our campuses who has tested positive or had an exposure to a positive individual was asked to complete the self report form. This form allowed a user to login to pre-populate information. They were asked questions about when they were last on campus and where they are isolating.
After a self report is submitted, this is sent to our Case Management team. Since we know who the individual is, if it is a student, we pull their class schedule to identify individuals who may have been exposed. If it’s an employee, we pull their departmental coworkers. The case managers can then add notes and contact those who may have been exposed. It can also trigger a list of rooms that need cleaning due to the positive case.
Reporting
The positive self report data were aggregated to give our leadership an overall picture of where there may be outbreaks: either in certain classes, departments, rooms, groups, etc. The reporting also combines county health department data to show how our college population comes to the county reporting. We also needed to build easy exports for reporting to our state department of health and state education system.
Seating Charts
Another important part of opening our campuses was understanding who has been in the proximity of others. We asked all instructors to maintain a seating chart and to upload this chart into our COVID tool so the case managers could find it when there is a positive case. APEX made this easy with it’s file upload option on forms and easy storage of the file.
Testing
In November 2020, our governor announced that higher education institutions would begin testing on campus. We had a few weeks to implement functionality for testing appointment scheduling, administration of tests, and reporting test results. Again, it was a rush to implement this functionality. What we built allows a user to login, view times available for appointments, and book, with an email confirmation sent after booking. Our testing staff can check a user in, administer the test, record the results, and then an automated email is sent to the user with their results.
The next quick development we needed to do was in the Spring 2021 when we were asked to do mandatory randomized testing. Functionality needed for this was to randomly pick a portion of students each week (based on the current positivity rate on campus), notify those students, then track who had completed their test.
Technology Used
We chose Oracle APEX for development of this tool despite hearing about other schools in our state system that were using tools like Qualtrics, a survey tool. The advantage of using a development tool is that we could completely customize this to our needs instead of trying to make pre-built software fit the need when it wasn’t built for that purpose. What we built was the envy of other schools! APEX as a low-code development tool allowed us to leverage out-of-the-box functionality to be able to develop faster. Our APEX environment was already provisioned and used for other purposes so that also saved us time. The APEX environment was configured on our data warehouse server which had resources to handle the load of many students self-reporting and creating test appointments at one time. Lastly, since we had access to the data warehouse data, it was easy to augment the capabilities of this tool with data available in the warehouse such as student schedules and employee information.
