How the Scottish NHS used ServiceNow to establish its COVID-19 contact tracking service within four weeks

With the beginning of the national lockdown, governments around the world are racing to establish a comprehensive contact tracking system to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The concept of “tracking” is not a new concept, and has been considered an effective tool to fight epidemics-however, with the reality of the deadly coronavirus, many countries have established these systems for the first time, which seems to surprise many people.

Contact tracking works by trying to identify people who have been in close contact with people who have tested positive or have symptoms of COVID-19. Then urge all these traced contacts to self-isolate in order to reduce continued transmission.

To date, Scotland is approaching 20,000 known coronavirus infections and 2,500 known deaths. However, due to the lengthening of the lockdown, the reduction of population concentration and the focus on methods of determining the local epidemic situation, Scotland has so far achieved greater success in controlling the virus than its neighboring countries south of the border.

We were fortunate to have a conversation with Deryck Mitchelson, Digital Director and Chief Information Security Officer of Scotland’s NHS National Services Department, to understand how the country hopes to continue to maintain its leading position in COVID-19 through its established contact tracking program. Use ServiceNow for only four weeks.

Mitchellson explained that the plan is based on a two-tier system-focusing on both the national level and the use of health experts at the local level. The national team is responsible for the “heavy work”, while the local team is responsible for providing local expertise. The task required by the Mitchelson team is to build a digital solution that aggregates all testing and tracking into one place.

However, Mitchelson added that Scotland does not want to adopt a technology-first approach and only focus on human support. He said:

The Scottish approach revolves around human expertise and human aspects. This is different from the UK, which focuses on automation. We work very hard to focus on expertise and human factors, and digital systems are behind.

Currently, we have hundreds of contact trackers, and now there are many at national and local levels. The key is that we are using a system, all test results will flow into the system, and all contacts will be added to the system.

Scotland’s contact tracking system also collects data on venues and settings, provides management information on service efficiency, and identifies coronavirus hot spots across the country.

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The NHS in Scotland believes that it is important to set expectations for the development of the contact tracking system-instead of creating an end-to-end product using the “big bang” approach, it focuses on building an MVP and adding features within a few weeks, and it learns more many. The MVP was established in four one-week sprints (four weeks in total).

The first week of sprint focused on service design work, and cooperated with some third parties engaged in contact tracking system work in Europe to absorb some professional knowledge and knowledge. The remaining three weeks are focused on implementing changes and creating data catalogs, integrating them into the data exchange layer, and establishing a user group of professional health consultants to advise on the recommendations needed to succeed.

Overall, the procedure has been successful so far. Mitchellson said:

all the best. Trying to integrate into the phone and the like will encounter some complicated problems. We have many such contact trackers working at home. We want end-to-end services, so some of them are more complicated than we initially thought. But we did get there within four weeks.

The NHS National Service (NSS) of Scotland decided to use ServiceNow as a platform to build the system. Mitchellson said that the decision was due to NHS Scotland’s experience with ServiceNow, which can use internal skills. He explained:

In any case, we have ServiceNow in NSS. It has been used in many NHSs in Scotland, especially in terms of ITSM functions. Then at NSS, we quickly started to use many workflow functions, and started to establish many business processes with the support of ServiceNow. Therefore, before even starting to use it for contact tracking, we have actually started using it to manage many PPE supply and demand. NSS also has a very good ServiceNow team.

After some businesses and PPE work are successful, this feels very appropriate. When we are asked to track and deliver something within four weeks, it is natural for me to hire the development team we have to focus on the configuration and implementation of the product. Obviously, with the help of ServiceNow, you will get a lot of digitization, a lot of work processes, and many of them are already at your service. For us, it took less time to build, which we managed to accomplish within four weeks, because we used many of the core functions obtained from the ServiceNow module.

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According to Mitchelson, in general, the contact tracking program has been successful. NHS Scotland obtained 50% of the test results from the British government’s Lighthouse Labs, which has a base in Glasgow. Then, the district health committee will provide the remaining results from their own laboratory, where they test NHS employees, nursing home workers and some members of the public. Mitchelson added:

We put all these test results into the integration center, and then put them into the ServiceNow instance. Once it enters ServiceNow, if it is a positive test result, we will see who it is and then we will contact them to start tracking. Who have you contacted? How many people are there in your family? Are there key workers? Everything is inseparable from positive test results.

We will also start to introduce things like proximity apps so that we can begin to understand who has contacted people who may have COVID-19. Then, we will push it back to the content management system that ServiceNow has worked with us, and we will also use it for contact tracking.

The service was launched at the end of June, and Mitchelson said that from a usability and performance point of view, “the feedback is great.” So many that NHS Scotland plans to invest in the platform in the future. He added:

The good news is that the board considers this to be an MVP, and has been working with us to make improvements as we try to incorporate more automation into it, which is also crucial. We think this is a legacy system, and we eventually built it to manage test results, pandemics and crises. This is not a system that we shut down ourselves, we see it as a system that can be used for other possible outbreaks in Scotland.

The team is now also considering integration with its data science platform so that it can better understand demographic information and hope to discover COVID-19 clusters before they become a growing hot spot. In addition, Scotland’s NHS is working on a self-service feature that will enable people to enter a lot of tracking information themselves, such as details about their family and colleagues.

Mitchelson is not yet able to disclose much information about the success rate of the contact tracking system, as the data will be submitted to the Scottish government for evaluation this week. However, he did say:

This week, we have begun to provide guarantees for tracked and failed data. This is a very positive number, and I think it is consistently higher than some other contact tracking services provided by the four countries. This is a very effective service if you check the data of our contact tracking in Aberdeen and the speed of completion.