Creating an Improved COVID-19 Patient Experience for a National Diagnostics Laboratory

How do you efficiently provide high-demand testing services in a pandemic? Our client, a national diagnostics laboratory, recognized the need to build out their digital support in support of drive-through testing sites. See how we helped them respond with a scalable solution – built, tested, and released in less than four weeks -- aligned to their digital transformation roadmap.

With the latest wave of cases causing high demand for COVID-19 testing, our client needed support from design to delivery of a solution that would streamline the customer experience at their drive-through testing locations. While the application would be developed for this short-term need, the client also needed the solution to fit into their digital transformation roadmap.

Build an omni-channel application (web/mobile) that builds efficiency and improves the customer experience from test registration to results delivery.

With the solution, patients can:

1. securely register themselves using third-party identity providers
2. select the nearest testing location from a map
3. pre-order a test (for themselves or family members)
4. digitally sign their test consent
5. follow up and/or be notified on their test results

At the end of the registration, a QR Code would be generated, so that it could be read at the test location, expediting the check-in process. The whole workflow was streamlined for agility, so that a patient could do it within minutes while still in line for a test in any given location.

From a back-office perspective, the application allows the staff at the test location to:

1. read a patient’s QR code and confirm the order details
2. register a patient quickly, at the time of service
3. print specimen container labels
4. pull reports and view KPIs of patients and test locations

Given the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 cases, a challenge was presented: deliver the entire solution to production within 4 weeks.

To accomplish that, Methodiq partnered with the lab’s IT department, along with other providers, to design, develop and deliver a full-blown solution – patient and back-office, fully integrated with new and legacy systems.

How the work was divided:

1. The lab’s IT department was responsible for the integration of middleware and the solution database, both acting as a bridge between their legacy systems and the new solution
2. Two additional providers were responsible for the infrastructure and identity management.
3. Methodiq was assigned the full greenfield development work.

With an aggressive deadline, we first prioritized and distributed user stories across the 4 planned sprints. Initial planning depended on clear scope, deferring some low-value items to later phases, while still marking some of them as stretch goals within each sprint.

Communication was anchored by daily standups, ongoing group chats, and regular touchpoints to ensure the plan was being thoroughly followed and that any blockers could be immediately removed.

A functional minimum viable product (MVP) was incrementally built, delivered, and demonstrated each week so that the end-user could visualize the product. This helped the client add and/or assess the most valuable features and adjust the course sooner, whenever needed.

During the development process, unit/functional tests were also implemented and submitted, to ensure the delivered features met the user stories and the acceptance criteria.

After an intense 4-week development phase, the product was finally released for the final end-to-end testing by the Lab’s SMEs on the customer environment.

This joint effort contributed to a high-quality and time-record delivery, helping the lab meet its strategic goals while responding to the market challenges in a timely and scalable fashion.

While time was a constraint for this project, the Methodiq team kept in mind the long-term goals of the customer. The application was built on top of a foundational framework, which decoupled its components and allowed for future reusability and scalability. This flexibility will allow the customer to pivot from a web-first to a mobile-first approach, aligning to the next phase of their digital transformation roadmap.