Empowering Australia's pathology providers' and COVID-19 Drive Through Testing
30th August 2021
Drive-Through testing options for COVID-19 are springing up more and more. During Sydney’s worst COVID-19 outbreak to date (Delta variant), we leveraged the XTRAHUB platform to speed up COVID Drive-Through testing. With NSW’s Chief Health Officer encouraging increased community testing, it wasn’t long before there were traffic jams across COVID Drive-Through locations. But will this testing method prove quicker and safer, or will its outdated and slow process become a problem?
With multiple COVID Drive-Through locations across the state, the existing pen and paper model took roughly five minutes per vehicle. In addition, at the end of each day, the paper forms still needed to be collected and manually entered to be captured in the Laboratory Information System (LIS). Due to these slow processing capacities and a lack of streamlined digitalised capabilities, there was a need to find a solution to this growing problem.
With the XTRAHUB platform at its core, we built a mobile application to speed up the collection process. This application moved the operation from pen and paper to digital. Collectors could then easily confirm this information without the need to interpret an individual’s handwriting. Upon completion of the collection XTRAHUB also sends the data directly to the LIS, meaning the patient can more quickly receive their results. This solution saw collecting a sample from each vehicle taking five minutes, to be completed in less than one minute while removing the need for manual data entry. Our solution boosted the number of people being tested by roughly 300%. We were able to not only test but process results much faster and more accurately.
COVID Drive-Through tests provide an accurate and safe testing experience within the comfort and privacy of your own car. Ultimately, it help decrease the number of people who visit hospitals and clinics to get tested for the COVID-19, reducing the burden of the pandemic on health care officers, and minimising the further spread of the disease.