Government of Jersey – People at heart

In a critical project where timeliness would literally save lives, Prosperity 24/7 and the Government of Jersey worked at speed to set up Jersey’s core Track and Trace platform using Dynamics 365, PowerBI, Azure Data Lake, and Microsoft Office. Using these tools, the Track and Trace team were able to liaise with every known positive case, their contacts and interactions. This robust technology, visualisation tools and dashboards have supported critical decision making, whilst protecting our community.

Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 was acknowledged as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on 12th March 2020. Jersey identified its first case of Covid-19 on March 10th. By 20th March, we had 12 confirmed cases in an environment of 372 negative tests and 38 tests, pending results. Initial Government modelling predicted a total mortality rate of up to 500 deaths, a significant proportion of Jersey’s population. The Government had no suitable central system to manage the pandemic or provide decision making insights to the Civil Service or Jersey’s Ministerial Government. 

It was in this time of need that the Government of Jersey approached Prosperity 24/7 with a request to support the urgent and critical need for tracking and contact tracing for all cases, as they were identified, to endeavour to control the outbreak of Covid-19 in Jersey.

This was deemed a critical project, where timeliness would literally save lives. Therefore, it was agreed to set aside all software development projects to commence immediately at 15:00 that day, with a view to working an initial 96 hour sprint to create a Covid-19 Case Management System that held the Island’s Population data in one location to track and trace every case and its links to:

• Every contact – direct and indirect.
• Every location where a contact has occurred.
• Every interaction a case has had with the aforementioned, to be able to visualise these interactions to provide management oversight on the outbreak both in geo / mapping insights but also dynamic interactions and case insights for cross infection tracking.

In parallel, the system had to enable a ‘simple to use’ central administrative platform to:

• Provide guided journeys for untrained case handlers to provide a consistent and excellent level of service to Citizens, securely and swiftly.
• Track the wellbeing of every positive case through their health ‘episode’.
• Track the support offered to the cases and direct contacts.
• Track the symptoms of the patient.
• Track their Covid-19 test results and health outcome throughout their interaction with the Environmental Health Department including tracking where the patient was located (home / hospital or beyond based on health outcome).

In addition to these internal operation requirements, the platform had to support external stakeholders to inform Jersey’s response to Covid-19. Our solution also had to:

• Integrate with the pathology system to receive live test results.
• Ensure that all available Citizen records are in one system to ensure accuracy in tracking and tracing (‘look up’ to ‘people’ rather than to create people to trace every interaction).
• Provide point in time analytics for:
  • Government Ministers as well as;
  • the Policy & Strategy Team.
  • the Environmental Health Team.
  • the Hospital / Health Team to plan accurately, the resources required to handle the pandemic.
  • Inform policy decisions on lockdown.
  • Inform the Island the health/outcome of all cases daily.
  • Inform policy decisions on relaxing the lockdown.

The platform was designed by Prosperity, leveraging the WHO Data Dictionary for all known reporting requirements to ensure that the output to the WHO or Public Health England, would be seamless and automated to reduce manpower overheads as case volume increases.

Our primary solution was based on Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 from an operational ‘Case Tracking’ perspective, with Executive or Operational reporting served using Azure Data Lake and PowerBI. This infrastructure has persisted throughout being enriched and enhanced as requirements have evolved from the Government.

By leveraging Dynamics 365 we utilise out of the box automation and integration to streamline the work experience to enable case handlers to radically accelerate their productivity when they need to. On average, they have to contact 18 direct contacts for every known case of Covid to provide advice and guidance regarding isolation and risk mitigation as well as tracking those individuals symptomatic journey’s in the system of record.

We use Power BI to aggregate and represent the data held in the Covid-19 CMS and present these insights visually to ensure that they demonstrate trends or risks which would not be easily discernible as pure data. Once the data is visualised and shared for consumers such as the Islands Environmental Health Executive or the Strategy and Policy team for example, then patterns are identified and addressed by analysts to inform policy decisions.

We have also utilised Microsoft Office 365 bookings for the post go-live Covid-19 testing regime across the Island.

We delivered all training (including Microsoft Teams training) to all Track and Trace staff, to enable a new function of Government to be initiated and run by a team of staff, some of whom were known to Environmental Health, others who were seconded from other areas of Government to handle the high volume, high risk, critical contact tracing.

Whilst the aforementioned focuses on the technology we also had to derive permissions from Data / System Owners, achieve all Data Protection agreement and governance requirements including engagement with the Island’s Office of the Information Commissioner to ensure that all system access and integration was lawful and permissible under clauses of ‘Public Health and Vital Interest’.

The project has been an incredible ‘team Jersey effort’ to achieve all lawful permissions in a matter of days. 

This system has saved countless lives. Not only has our system been used to define policy to ‘flatten the curve’, after a short period of lockdown, it has enabled the Island to start to unlock our economic activity ahead of expectations due to the fidelity and insights available to inform Government Policy in the summer of 2020.

The system has been designed to scale as required to meet the island’s needs, and has a clear purpose at its heart: to provide timely data to the Government to enable them to protect our community and our island.

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