How will we beat COVID-19 in the United States? Experts and business leaders agree that we can end this pandemic only with mass testing. It needs to be widespread, and easily available nationwide to everyone — not just first responders, hospital workers or those showing symptoms. Today, there is testing, but the ability for the public to get a test is challenging. Tests are offered by states, regions, hospital chains, community-based test sites, churches, and local volunteer organizations. However, the biggest problem is the availability of tests and long turnaround times for test results.
The good news is that we may soon have the ability to increase our testing capacity to hundreds of thousands of tests per day. Having the ability to see who has coronavirus — whether with symptoms or not — will be crucial. In addition, we may soon see the ability to do rapid serology tests to tell who has already been infected with the coronavirus and may have antibodies.
Now for the bad news. All of this means that we need a massively scaled testing effort. In addition to the staff and locations for testing, we will also need a high-scale appointment scheduling solution similar to that provided by Engageware.
We must make it easy for the public to easily find a test location, schedule a test, and be able to take a test without long waits. We already have seen that where drive-in testing is offered there are long lines, chaos, and warnings to “bring food and water” and that “there are no restrooms”. This is still happening today at Community-Based Testing Sites (CBTSs). For example, New Jersey has no scheduling for several drive-in sites which has been reported extensively by the media as a failure of leadership.
This is unacceptable. Any new nationwide testing effort must provide an appointment solution that meets the demand of a 10,000-fold increase in volume. The current systems set up by individual regions, cities and states are not ready for this.
Why are we in trouble? Because right now, even where appointment systems are being used, they are fragmented, basic, and often have been quickly re-purposed from other uses. Many were put together quickly to address the immediate issue but cannot scale. Some require previous registration into the local electronic health records system or require that that the person be a member of a hospital group or “concierge” system. Again, this will not scale to all 50 states, cities and regions, and also severely limits those who are not already part of the formal healthcare system, which can be a substantial number of people who are already vulnerable.
What we need is a highly scalable, flexible, and powerful appointment scheduling system that doesn’t require the public to pre-register, be a member of any particular health plan, or be affiliated with a specific hospital group.
This system would also allow flexibility to each local center with respect to defining the number of “lanes” to service, the staff availability, and test materials available, and allow easily definable workflows and hours of service. As important, there would be analytics providing a global view of testing, allowing planning and forecasting to ensure universal access to tests.
Finally, any system should be available via a search from “Google”, where 90% of those seeking testing will start. Recently, Google has allowed their integrated scheduling solution for Search and Maps (“Reserve with Google”) to support the health care industry with this type of appointment. We should be taking advantage of this to make it as easy as possible for those seeking a test.
We all want to beat COVID-19. The coronavirus testing sites that states, cities, and regions will make available will have challenges to support the demand from the public. The good news is that there are solutions today to address the appointment scheduling challenge, with existing systems that can handle tens of millions of appointments, and can be made available easily through Google search, web pages, and social media.
—Cimarron Buser, TASBIA™ CEO
