Building software tools that saved frontline COVID-19 testers 400,000 hours

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Challenge

In the early months of 2020, the U.S. was hit hard by COVID-19. After over 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With the virus spreading rapidly and invisibly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) struggled to track active COVID-19 cases across states, territories, and tribal nations to understand it better and contain its spread.

CDC needed two functions that didn’t exist: user-friendly software for frontline workers to collect COVID-19 test results and automation that would route those results to the appropriate municipality and then to CDC.

Solution

Working alongside volunteers and workers at temporary and pop-up testing sites, USDS collaborated with CDC and quickly deployed teams to observe, prototype, and build software tools nationwide in six weeks to meet demand. In the field, the project teams employed multiple approaches to develop a product to solve critical issues:

• Observing and interviewing government workers from over 20 local and state public health departments to understand their needs.

• Building, testing, and improving the tools to address the identified needs over time.

The project team spoke to more than 100 people during the process and gained insights that led to developing functional and time-saving products, improving the ability to test more efficiently. CDC and USDS iteratively built and adjusted the software tools based on feedback from stakeholders and users.

Using innovative thinking and technology best practices, the project team built two browser-based software tools that are easily deployable, cost-effective, fast, and accessible from any computer:

• Simple Report allows testing sites to collect and store test results and speed up workflow.

• Report Stream standardizes and routes test results from testing sites to the correct public health departments. These public health departments can send results easily to CDC for further data analysis.

Impact

As of early 2024, Report Stream routed more than 40 million COVID-19 test results to the correct public health departments, significantly increasing the data available for monitoring disease outbreaks and improving the accuracy and speed of reporting.

The Simple Report system has connected with over 15,000 testing sites, including non-traditional healthcare organizations such as schools, nursing homes, and cruise ships. These software tools have saved workers countless hours of manual labor. Furthermore, they have been repurposed for other viral diseases such as Mpox and seasonal flu outbreaks.

This rapid response project began a years-long partnership between USDS and CDC, setting the stage for future high-impact projects like Vaccines.gov/Vacunas.gov and the further modernization of CDC systems.

Visit USDS.gov/projects to learn more about the partnership between USDS and the CDC.

By the numbers