COVID-19: Four solutions helping governments, healthcare and citizens

We collaborated with our alliance partners at SAP and Qualtrics to deploy Qualtrics XM solutions and design an additional online assessment. EY uses Qualtrics for its annual global staff surveys, so this solution was an obvious go-to when working out how countries could collect data and report on the current state of the pandemic.

Based on our experience of working with healthcare clients, we also developed new survey questions specifically relevant to COVID-19, with different nuances per country. We also deployed ways of working that were freely available from the UK National Health Service, to provide leading-class underpinnings.

The first phase of our response was to help countries gauge how citizens were feeling and coping during the pandemic. We began working with an initial country on mass citizen outreach, building a tailored pre-screening survey that was embedded on the Government’s COVID-19 website portal and released through a social media campaign. We then built a smartphone app in seven languages. This helped the country’s Government connect with its citizens and understand what was on their minds.

We have since worked with more than 80 countries. It became clear that most were reporting on infections and deaths from the disease using heat maps. But this only tells one dimension of the story – we wanted to help countries reach out to the public to get two-way information and see a much deeper level of detail, so we worked with Qualtrics to implement four different modules:

1. COVID-19 Critical Care Protocol Solution

This is directed at early identification for high-risk patients. It utilizes guidelines from the World Health Organization and the Edmonton Frailty Scale and is powered by a critical care protocol algorithm. The solution assists in early flagging of high-risk patients by sharing and analyzing results in real time, allowing for more targeted allocation of critical care services that are already in short supply.

2. Qualtrics COVID-19 Initial Pre-Screening and Routing

This solution uses guided, automated FAQs to help people triage their needs before calling into public health departments. It can also be used by any health or government organization to provide accurate information at scale, while automatically creating reports to identify trends, patterns and gaps in information requests.

3. Qualtrics COVID-19 Dynamic Call Center Script

Local governments are setting up call centers (often for the first time) to respond to the crisis. To reduce call volume, and provide accurate, up-to-date information to callers, this solution directs citizens to the right resources based on their interests and questions. It also includes automatic reporting showing caller trends, patterns, and gaps in information requests.

4. Qualtrics COVID-19 Healthcare Workforce Pulse

Hospitals and health systems are struggling to keep up with demand. The frontline workforce is on 24/7 and feeling the strain. One national health provider we worked with initially asked us to help them understand and monitor the needs of its corporate organization employees and contractors, and then widened this to over 2 million of its clinical staff. The COVID-19 Healthcare Workforce Pulse solution helps healthcare administrators and leaders to rapidly understand, prioritize, and respond to immediate needs across their teams, when they need it most.

When a day feels like a week, speed of response is essential

These packaged solutions are available to more than 90 countries worldwide and are designed to help them react faster by gathering information from their citizens. For example:

• Identify individuals who may already be exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 and direct them to the right local resources to get the appropriate care
  
• Keep a finger on the pulse of community concerns by understanding and spotting trends in the data and determining if the information being provided is meeting the needs of the public
• Collect unified data for aggregation and analysis
• Assess healthcare resource needs and evaluate safety risks
• Monitor resilience and burnout of first responders

The next wave will focus on long-term recovery, putting in place tools and solutions to help governments sustain their response. We are now combining new functionality to add value to the solutions, particularly around the testing, tracking and tracing of the disease – testing people for COVID-19, tracking the spread of the virus, then tracing any people an infected person has come into contact with.

EY is already discussing these next steps with many large organizations including NGOs, banks and even military organizations. Next, our solutions could be deployed to areas such as the supply chain of medicines and medical equipment, and offering greater support to citizens.  

We are now exploring deeper levels of granularity and longer-term analytics to make the information collected more action-oriented, whether that’s routing people to the right resources, arranging treatment, or arranging delivery of food or medicine. We are also helping more call centers to manage and route high volumes of calls.

We are also working with SAP to broaden the application of our solutions for businesses.

“The top issue for many companies, both in the public and private sector, is how do I protect my people and ensure they stay safe and sane? The bigger the universe, the more you need a digital solution to be able to have two-way communication about this,” says Hanne Jesca Bax, EY Global SAP leader and EY EMEIA Markets & Accounts Leader.

COVID-19 took the world by surprise, but fast, informed reactions have helped to limit its harmful impacts. The fight against the virus is far from over. But organizations, institutions and businesses now have the opportunity to develop foresight in how they deal with the longer-term implications of COVID-19. And one thing is clear: in an era of social distancing, coming closer together – alliances, citizens, employees – is a strategic advantage.