How our drive-thru screening center and booking system increased our COVID-19 test registering capacity
COVID-19, the spread
COVID-19, or also called the coronavirus, has reshaped our world. The pandemic has spread with alarming speed, infecting millions of people and impacting the economy activities of countries all around the globe.
Brazil has become at the time of this post, the country with the second-highest number of confirmed coronavirus infections in the world, after registering more than two million cases.
In March 2020, all Brazilian states implemented some social distancing measures and imposed a quarantine — businesses, schools and public spaces were closed and people were asked to stay at home. But in order to isolation measures get effect, it is required frequent testing of the population. They play an important role in the spread of COVID-19, since identifying individuals infected with no symptoms, could help public health workers to be more effective at contract tracing by identifying others who have been exposed and may require quarantine. Furthermore, it may slow down the outbreak, therefore local hospitals not get overwhelmed, and have available intensive care units for the seriously ill patients and people who are not infected but require hospital healthcare procedures.
At Pernambuco, where our lab Genomika Diagnósticos headquarters is located, the number of confirmed cases continues increasing, since March more than 80,000 cases were confirmed with COVID-19.
Our core business before the outbreak was focused on molecular testing exams for rare diseases , hereditary cancers and tumours. But as the COVID-19 spread at Brazil, the quarantine was imposed by the local governamental policies, many people had to stay at home, triggering a significant reduction in physician office visits . Consequently, our molecular genetics testing volume was severely impacted. How would we handle to this new scenario ?
The need for pivot!
In the startup world , pivoting means a shift to a new business strategy to accommodate changes in its industry, customer preferences, or any other factor that impacts its business model.
In our case, the "pivot" does not mean to entail drastically changing the whole company. We faced an important problem: a huge drop in lab test volumes due to the pandemic. We needed to address this problem, and our "pivoting" move was focusing on a different market by positioning our lab into a new vertical: COVID-19 infection testing.
Two kinds of tests are used to determine COVID-19 infection. One, the PCR test (polymerase chain reaction test), can be done with a throat swab and determines if you have the infection now. This test is used for those concerned if they have the virus because of symptoms.
The second test is the antibody test and has growing interest as it can determine if you have been infected with the virus and fought off the disease. Both tests have many false positives, and recent exposure, particularly with the antibody test, may not trigger a positive for one to three weeks.
At Genomika, for about one month, we changed our lab routines to support the COVID-19 laboratory procedures and systems and offer to the public the PCR and antibody tests.
With an increasing number of suspected and/or symptomatic individuals to be tested at Recife, we needed a safe and efficient screening system. Inspired by the Korea drive-through (DT) center, we implemented a drive-thru testing site, where people stay in their car while our health care team do a test.
Despite the operational drive through , we came to another huge challenge: registering and payment handling of all the coronavirus patients.
Let's anticipate our digital transformation
Before the virus outbreak, we were developing our MVP for a on-line molecular testing request platform, so patients could perform a request for some of our exams from their mobile phone/personal computer. It would be released late at this year, but our plans were completely anticipated.
Our call center normally handled the users calls and Whatsapp conversations before the pandemic, so they could answer questions about the exams, book and process the payments for the exams. As the pandemic started, the calls and conversations have multiplied, a high volume rate with more than 40% calls/conversations compared to the previous months, by affecting our customers waiting long time for an answer. It was clear that our old CRM flow weren't available to handle our calls and conversations. We had drastically to change that. Our IT team came to rescue again.
After several meetings with our customer service and executive team, we modified our on-line request testing platform to support customers appointments to our drive-thru. In one month, we released our online scheduling system for COVID-19 tests .
Our customer could book on-line the test: by registering, uploading the medical request form, paying and receiving the final report. All the process on-line without needing to go our lab or calling to our call center. Our UX team has put a great effort to make the experience similar to a familiar on-line e-commerce. Our platform were all developed using Python-Django with Metronic Bootstrap and PagSeguro payment platform.
Our current results
Over three months on-line, our booking system routed most of appointments and requests earlier performed by our call center. This maximised our call center's efficiency and customer service in order to register our increasing volume of patients interested at COVID-19 tests.
Before the platform, our maximum registering rate was about 300–400 people per month. Until at the time of this post (about three months), more than 14,000 people were assisted by our on-line scheduling platform.
Also available as B2B platform!
As the coronavirus quarantine rules were becoming more flexible, more people started going back to work. As result, many companies and factories located at Pernambuco looked after laboratories that could perform the COVID-19 tests. We also developed a white label of our scheduling systems, so the companies could book on-line their workforce staff for our drive-through or our HQ laboratory, according to the test selected.
Demo
We recorded a appointment demo from one of fictional customers, presenting the main features:
- Appointment system for antibody and PCR COVID-19 tests;
- Support to on-line payment handling using PagSeguro gateway platform;
- Live test tracking during all their internal steps at our laboratory;
- Test report available as download directly from the portal;
Concluding remarks
For many genetic testing laboratories , the COVID-19 virus pandemic turned upside down the main revenue stream. The laboratories had to make harsh decisions to prepare themselves during the outbreak. In our case, Genomika Diagnósticos adapted its main genetics lab workflow to a virology testing site in about one month. For labs with slow changing businesses models, it could result in months of almost no revenue, without preparation or having COVID-19 tests at their exams portfolio.
Another challenge faced by small labs is the rapidly increasing number of individuals to be tested for COVID-19. For safe and efficient screening, our solution was implement a drive-through screening center, where people could be tested without leaving their cars.
Finally, we had faced the massive volume of calls and Whatsapp conversations for COVID-19 instructions and registering. We needed a quick solution for mitigating the overflow of our call center. For this task, we released a on-line scheduling system for COVID-19 tests, where people could register, pay and receive the instructions for the drive-through testing at the scheduled day. In 24hrs people could be tested without talking with one of our lab customer staff.
We can conclude that the combination of an on-line e-commerce adapted for our lab tests could handle thousands of COVID-19 suspected individuals requesting for the test, added to the DT site, which increased our testing capacity over 100 tests per day.
Special thanks
This solution would not be on-line assisting our population, if those people listed below didn't give their feedback and support:
- Our executive team lead by Doctor João Bosco Oliveira Filho, PHD ; who pivoted our lab in one month, turning it into a virology lab.
- Our operational chief officer (COO) Diana Meira;
- Our customer service coordinator Aline Arruda and her team who gave us all the information to have the best flow for our patients and backoffice;
- Our financial and commercial team lead by the CFO Carlos Saito;
- Out IT team lead by Nielson Santana, Danilo Soares, Fábio Soares and Rheno Formiga;
- Out QA guy , Mr. Marcelo Coelho, who helped us in the QA bugs inspection;
- Our UX Designer and Front-End Developer, Dyego Carlos with his funcional and overwhelming designs! :)
- Capyba Software Studio lead by Diogo Caetano and hist team for making this happen;
- All our customers who believed at Genomika Diagnósticos, and chose us as their laboratory for the COVID-19 testing.
