HSE - Antigen Service Delivery for Schools - Call Centre and Online Channels Setup and Delivery Operation 

Health Service Executive (HSE) 

Antigen Test Distribution - ICT Programme

BACKGROUND

In November 2021, VISION Consulting (VISION) was engaged by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to set up the School Antigen Test Delivery Program for Primary Schools, later expanded to include Childcare Facilities and distribution via an online portal for people aged 4-39 who were close contacts or showed symptoms of COVID-19, and later extended to everybody under 60 years of age.

VISIONs appointment followed the team’s key role in the successful roll-out of Ireland’s COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Vaccination projects. The program required four elements of ICT development to be successful: (1) Telephony and Contact Centre service, (2) Customer Relationship Management tool, and (3) an online web portal for taking order requests, and (4) data transfers for the above for processing orders and reporting.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES 

The program initially aimed to build a call center infrastructure to support a team of call center agents taking and approving order requests to be delivered by JMC, VISION and HSE delivery partners. 

As cases of COVID-19 rose through December and PCR testing capacity was exceeded, the scope of the project expanded to offer an alternative testing solution to the wider population via an online portal. 

Both elements of the program were notable for the extremely short timescales within which we were required to develop, test and go live with the service.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

VISION APPROACH

The need for antigen testing was immediate and required an urgent solution. VISION partnered a senior project manager with subject matter experts (specifically, in telephony, software development, and web development) and tasked them with producing a minimum viable product quickly, which VISION could improve iteratively once the program was up and running.

PROJECT DELIVERY

Within just four days, VISION had achieved the following:

Telephony & Contact Centre Service

• Secured a freephone number for use by the general public

• Stress tested the phone line to satisfy capacity limits of up to cater for 6,000 concurrent callers per hour

• Designed, built and released a simple IVR message to guide callers in to the freephone number

• Created Amazon Connect user profiles for all 60 Agents

• Configured Amazon Connect to display key live and historical metrics and agents stats, and record and playback calls.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool 

By utilising and modify the already successful CRM tool from the RM Vaccine rollout program and adding additional functionality such as:

• Unique user profiles for all users

• Ability to take and save order requests

• Automated, instant validation of requests against Roll Numbers provided by callers

Data Transfer & Reporting

• Orders were automatically verified, and a delivery file was generated multiple times throughout the day (8 files per day for Schools & Childcare service). The delivery file was configured to be uploaded automatically to an An Post system for easy label generation and outbound texting

• Amazon Connect was configured to produce extracts for reporting on all significant metrics related to telephony, e.g. inbound call volumes (by date, by time, by agent), calls answered vs dropped, call handling time, queue time, agent occupancy, etc.

• Reports on order volumes by hour and by day were generated automatically and could be viewed in real time on Google Sheets

Within the first week of launch VISION had arranged delivery for more than 25,000 antigen test kits. The sum total of deliverables produced over a short period of time represents an extraordinary achievement and one of our most successful ICT projects in and of itself.

Web Portal

VISION was asked on the 21st of December 2021 to expand the service to include a web portal which would be open to the general for launch on January 3rd 2022.  Again, the team mobilised quickly and over the holiday period to: 

• Identify specialised personnel who were available to develop the solution, and reschedule the teams work to prioritise this program

• Develop the web portal in line with the functionality requirements and HSE’s design guidelines for online services

• Develop the end-to-end data transfer process – a delivery file was produced 33 times per day for the new online service to manage anticipated demand

• Complete full testing of the portal; Stress Testing, User Acceptance Testing, and End-to-End Service Testing

The web portal was launched on time and to spec on January 3rd 2022, and the team facilitated and processed requests for the delivery of over 150,000 tests through the portal in its first week live. Again, this was one of our best examples of development at pace, especially given the complications of working over Christmas.

HOW THE SERVICE IMPROVED

Post-launch,  VISION developed and pushed live the following enhancements to improve the service: 

CONTRACT PERFORMANCE 

OUTCOMES 

The tools and pathways VISION developed have worked consistently and effectively for the duration of the project. An independent Pen test (security test for assessing online services) found our web portal to be in line with HSE’s security requirements.

Since the start date the tools and pathways VISIONS team developed      have facilitated the delivery of over 1 million antigen kits: