The COVID-19 Testing and Compliance Product was offered at imaware from 2020 until 2022 and allowed employers, municipal governments, and individuals to track, monitor, and manage COVID-19 status.
The product included multiple features including:
Four testing modalities at three laboratories, each requiring specific API integrations
Employer specific compliance programs which allowed for visibility into complex non-compliant staff triggers
HIPAA-compliant Patient Portal which was desktop and mobile friendly, including SMS and email notifications
Integration to state reporting platforms to remain compliant with directives in 10 states as well as employer BI platforms
Daily health screening assessment platform which allowed for completion daily without authentication or downloading of an app
Wireframes from the desktop version of the Patient Portal illustrate the easy to view compliance dashboard which draws immediate attention to items requiring action.
My Role
This program started about 2 weeks into my employment with imaware and began to quickly morph as the product offering for COVID-19 management was ever-changing as the pandemic evolved. We (the CEO, an external engineering firm, and myself) initially used the imaware core platform which was designed around single interaction blood testing. We made the core platform work for our first few clients while we found our product-market fit. This involved a large number of manual reports and spreadsheets to run compliance reports for employers.
Upon landing a handful of larger clients, the need became apparent for a dedicated system which could handle the lab interface and ensure compliance across three categories: testing, health assessments, and temperature checks. Each employer had their own cadence of when and where these items were due which added additional requirements to the products ultimate launch.
After consulting with our internal teams, I determined that the COVID-19 product should move off of the imaware core platform and run indepently. Upon gathering approval from internal stakeholders, I began assembling an agile product and engineering team to build the platform. I ran the team for over 18 months while we consistently improved, maintained, and eventually sunset the product.
Tech Stack
The COVID-19 products I built at imaware utilized a varying tech stack from the beginning. Our initial product, which ran on the imaware core platform, utilized a custom-built portal on top of AWS and interfaced with our labs using HL7. After taking the product off the core platform, we moved it to a low-code system called Caspio which was then layered onto another low-code platform named WebFlow. This allowed for us to quickly build the database, portals, and compliance reports with limited engineering effort. We still had interfaces via HL7 but also built a CSV import/export automation utility which communicated with labs over SFTP. This simple technology allowed the product to onboard additional labs quickly as the demand increased.
Later in the project, more complex logic was built in for advanced compliance monitoring and a streamlined patient interaction workflow. One client also funded a spinoff project to conduct COVID-19 Antibody testing and I hired a firm from California to build the necessary modifications for that style of testing.
In addition to the product being a web-app as opposed to a native app, the COVID-19 Patient Portal utilized SMS messaging to send reminders, test results, and other important information. SMS allowed for constant interaction with the app regardless of phone type, technical ability, or high speed cellular internet access.
The Results
The platform launched on December 28, 2020 (a day I’ll remember for a long time!) and that was the largest testing day ever recorded on the product. Our product had conducted 1,170 tests over a 12 hour period. Capturing the data was the easy part however, the system now had to send that information to the processing laboratory in a readable format, receive the results back about 6 hours later, and send a text message with the result shortly thereafter. Just 7 days later, the platform had to send out a recurring test reminder as part of the compliance program that the first employer who was onboarded to the platform required. Everything, fortunately (just kidding, it took a ton of hard work and planning!), went quite well on launch day and over the next 15 months the system ended up processing close to 80,000 tests by the time it was retired in March 2022.
In addition to the testing product, the platform conducted over 750,000 health screen assessments which triggered around 250 nurse consultations. By the end of the product offering, 75 employers and over 5,000 employees had used the system. The COVID-19 program at imaware generated over $25,000,000 in revenues and was the most successful product in the companies history.
