The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia Quality Assurance Programs (RCPAQAP) is a world leader in the provision of external quality assurance (EQA) for pathology laboratories. EQA programs are used to assess laboratories' diagnostic and technical proficiency, an essential process to ensure accuracy in pathology results.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals raced to create reliable testing methods, produced at scale. RCPAQAP moved as urgently as possible to assist with point-of-care testing, setting up independent applications to capture, synchronise, and transfer testing data between patients and the necessary medical professionals and governing bodies.
RCPAQAP needed to successfully - and urgently - roll out a new point-of-care testing quality assurance program for COVID-19, to ensure the surging supply of test kits were performing as healthcare providers expected. Ease of use during a very stressful time for individuals would be critical for the application’s accuracy and success.
It needed to be accurate, it needed to be simple, and they needed it fast. RCPAQAP and Trineo together set to design and build consumer-facing and healthcare professional end-to-end applications that:
Our Solutions and UX team approached RCPAQAP’s challenge with the design philosophy of simplicity and speed, quickly creating consumer and medical professional applications with the minimum data requirements.
In a matter of hours, Trineo was able to provide an initial prototype designed to enable easy enrolment in EQA programs, entering necessary data and syncing back to the appropriate systems much faster than prior methods.
As new information and requirements became available, we continued to test and learn whilst building out the appropriate capabilities and ensuring our applications and data systems would be robust enough and ready in time to go live.
We delivered:
We produced a live MVP in two weeks and continued iterating on the development whilst RCPAQAP was navigating government approvals. Within six weeks, they began enrolling customers into the program.
RCPAQAP was able to provide EQA programs for all approved COVID-19 tests with the ability to add new testing formats as they came to market in real-time.
Traditional external quality assurance programs return results in 2-3 weeks. This solution allowed RCPAQAP to substantially reduce this time, and provide immediate provisional feedback to the operator on their test performance. Early identification of poorly performing operators allows RCPAQAP to intervene within 24 hours, reassess and re-train the operators performing the test.
The assurance of accurate, timely COVID-19 testing has immeasurable benefits to both public health and the economy. The application soon showed tangible benefits to customers by rapidly detecting poorly performing COVID-19 test kits, allowing them to be removed and replaced with better performing tests. The impact of avoiding misdiagnosis prevents further community transmissions.
You can read more on this work on Heroku's blog, in Coding at the speed of a pandemic.
We've worked with the Kilterset team over the years so we knew we could expect creativity and expert consultation. The team moved quickly to understand the challenges with COVID-19 testing and come up with a concept as the world was experiencing a growing pandemic. Using their Express model, they were able to quickly prototype and provide brand new testing applications in a matter of weeks. Our customers have been really impressed with how easy the solution is to set up and use on a daily basis.
Derek Holzhauser, RCPAQAP.
Kilterset is always looking for great people to join our team
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