As federal officials increasingly rely on tech companies to help combat the spread of COVID-19, entrepreneurs across the country are retooling their existing digital applications to aid in coronavirus detection and prevention efforts. Whether it’s working with local and state health officials to leverage their apps, or figuring out ways to implement their services in a beneficial way, startups are determining how to best utilize their mobile apps for the public good.
We previously profiled four startups that pivoted their business operations in order to better support Americans and startups affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the latest post in our continuing series on the ways in which startups and entrepreneurs are responding to the coronavirus outbreak, Engine spoke with two app-focused startups that are retooling their services to help identify and treat infected Americans.
HomeSafe1st
St. Louis, Missouri
HomeSafe1st is the creation of Trevor Brooks, the Founder and CEO of community policing app GunBail—a diversion program that allows law enforcement officials and U.S. attorney’s offices to safely confiscate illicit weapons from criminal circulation while also eliminating the need for unnecessary arrests.
While creating GunBail, Brooks built up a relationship with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), where he was connected to the Director of the Center for Health and Justice. They provided him with a scuttled research report on what had been the most successful gun violence prevention program in the country.
Brooks decided to revive the program digitally by creating HomeSafe1st, a consent to search and anonymous reporting tool used to prevent mass shooting events and overdoses. The public safety platform received a contract from the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office which expanded into a pilot with the St. Louis Department Of Education, but the day it was supposed to launch was the day that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced that the state’s public schools were closing as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
HomeSafe1st was one of the winners of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) 2019 City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, so Brooks reached out to Amazon about leveraging the platform to meet the emerging public health threat.
“We are an open alert system for anything community related, so this was a natural progression for us,” Brooks said. “I called Amazon and said this is something we need an alert system for. Within 48 hours we built it—not just the front, but we built a very extensive basic response system for everything, from natural disasters to pandemics.”
HomeSafe1st operates as a supplement to other health organizations and agencies that are being overwhelmed by the public as a result of the pandemic. The platform has built-in AI components and social services, including a chatbot and call center, to support those who believe they have the virus. Users are pre-screened by an AI chatbot, which identifies, tracks, and rates the severity of reported symptoms. Healthcare and volunteer operators then call the users back and provide instructions for care, which depends on the seriousness of their symptoms—ranging from self-care info sourced from health organizations like the CDC, to calls with a live doctor to expedite treatment and response.
Brooks is working with St. Louis local housing authorities, the St. Louis Department of Health and the United Way 211 via the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office to expand out the service even further. Things are happening so quickly that they’ve been updating a new version of HomeSafe1st every day.
“We saw it coming, we got in front of it, we pivoted our technology and our contract with St. Louis, and we rolled that out,” Brooks said. “And we’ve been getting a ton of good responses.”
One of the most rewarding aspects of the app has been the response they’ve gotten from users. A 73-year-old grandmother who tested positive for the virus at the local hospital was sent home but soon developed a 105 degree fever. Her family used the app, and the doctors who reached out to her worked to ensure that she wasn’t sent home again in her condition. Doing some simple contact tracing through the platform, the service was also able to trace the virus back to four different residences and nine people—despite it still being a small pilot program.
“This is a time of fear and concern,” Brooks said. “If the automatic technology tools do their job, we can track down who may be asymptomatic, the high concentration contact areas, and where it’s being transferred to other unrelated individuals regularly so we can address that.”
SampleServe
Traverse City, Michigan
SampleServe is a startup that offers two mobile apps—a field app and a laboratory app—to streamline the data collection process for environmental sampling work. Environmental field technicians can collect and digitally transfer relevant data to laboratories, and also print out QR coded labels using a thermal label printer to identify and track shipped samples. The service’s lab app allows researchers to quickly scan QR codes and upload all relevant data from the shipped samples, thereby saving around 45 minutes of data entry work for each cooler full of samples.
The day after Congress passed the first of its coronavirus stimulus packages, President Donald Trump said that the government was hoping to set up testing sites in parking lots across the country. Russell Schindler, the CEO of SampleServe, saw the president’s announcement on the news and thought that his apps could be put to use as part of the effort.
“Having knowledge of the data side of conducting that many tests, I thought about how they were going to manage that data,” Schindler said. “It’s easy to do in a hospital when it’s low volume and by appointment, but when you’re trying to do thousands of tests in a remote parking lot, it’s just a data management nightmare.”
Because SampleServe’s apps are able to digitally code and transfer field data to labs, Schindler wanted to test the feasibility of retooling his services to aid healthcare professionals in their field testing efforts. He had a friend who owned a local tent company, so he called him up to test out the feasibility of the drive-thru idea.
“We decided to do a mock-up test demonstration of how it would work,” Schindler said. “We set up a tent in his parking lot and planned out how it would work, with our system printing out sample labels and a mock questionnaire to get the idea out there.”
SampleServe uploaded a YouTube video of the test and has been working to modify its apps for use in COVID-19 field testing efforts. Wide-spread field testing efforts have been slow to materialize, however, and Schindler said that the Traverse City-based field test site only has a capacity to test 100 people a day—often a group that has been whittled down to those who likely already have the virus. With many carriers of the virus asymptomatic, Schindler said widespread testing efforts and contact tracing tools are needed to better combat the viral outbreak.
“We need to do massive testing and likely test everyone, probably more than one time,” Schindler said. “Death rates are down and social distancing measures are working, but once people go out—and if 50 percent of those who have it don’t know they have it—then the numbers are going to go back up. Widespread, door-to-door mobile app testing will make it easier to tackle the problem. And we can do all that with software.”
While SampleServe is still moving forward with plans to transition its apps to combat the virus, they need a cash infusion (about $150,000) to be able to quickly make the transition happen. Schindler has been working with public and private organizations, including in Spain, to expedite a full-scale rollout of the redeveloped app.
“We’re chipping away at it, but we’re just waiting for someone to help us out,” Schindler said. “Whether it’s our software or someone else's, something needs to be done.”
