Friendship Schools streamlined their testing process with Workflow Services by ImageMover to reduce administrative time spent on testing by 75%
Friendship Public Charter School in Washington DC partnered with ImageMover to use the Becton Dickinson Veritor System to address their COVID-19 testing throughput efficiency and high amounts of administrative time spent on result communication & reporting to local/federal authorities. Through this partnership, Friendship schools was able to increase the number of tests they are performing, reduce administrative time by 75%, and return to the focus of their mission – growing and motivating their students.
Friendship Public Charter School provides education to pre-K through 12th grade students across 15 school campuses throughout Washington, DC. Friendship’s mission is to provide world class education that motivates students to achieve high academic standards, enjoy learning, and develop as ethical, literate, well-rounded and self-sufficient citizens who contribute actively to their communities. This mission was challenged greatly as the COVID-19 pandemic restricted in-person learning. Friendship met the challenge head-on by implementing COVID protocols to ensure the health of their students, faculty, and administrative staff.
With the help of The Rockefeller Foundation and Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE), Friendship implemented a COVID testing program for students and staff across their 15 campuses. The testing program was rolled out with rapid antigen tests which required swabbing and visually inspecting the test result, manually recording test kit information, and manual documenting the results. Once the results were documented, Friendship staff would communicate results to parents and staff as needed through individual emails and phone calls. Friendship staff would additionally spend time submitting individual test results to the local health authority to ensure compliance with reporting mandates.
The testing process and resulting workflow was sufficient for Friendship schools at first but grew more cumbersome as more and more students opted-in to the testing program. Friendship schools discovered the BD Veritor System for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 along with Workflow Services by ImageMover could improve the quality of their testing program. BD partnered with ImageMover to provide a highly configurable point-of-care testing workflow engine, Workflow Services. Workflow Services by ImageMover enables non-traditional care settings, such as the COVID testing process at Friendship Public Charter School, to easily manage their test subject population test result collection process through automated communication to interested parties, real-time reporting to health authorities, and direct test subject access to result data.
“Visually reading a rapid antigen test can be difficult as positive result markers on the test kit are difficult to discern and can sometimes even be missed.”
Diane Harris
Friendship Schools Director of Health Services
Prior to BD and ImageMover, Friendship Schools experienced several different challenges with their testing process. The first related to human error with interpreting other antigen tests. Friendship Schools Director of Health Services, Diane Harris, notes that “Visually reading a rapid antigen test can be difficult as positive result markers on the test kit are difficult to discern and can sometimes even be missed.” The BD Veritor System offers improved results reliability and reduces human error by analyzing the rapid antigen test results with one-button functionality. Once the results were available, the Friendship schools administrative resources spent a significant amount of time documenting results and sharing the results with the parents and staff.
Time used to record results before and after Workflow Services
3min ➜ 30s
Documenting results is the final step in the testing workflow at Friendship. Before Workflow Services, the testing process included capturing a photo of the rapid test kit, in addition to different forms to record the data requirements for reporting to the health authority. This process took the recorders almost 3 minutes per test to complete. Once Workflow Services was implemented, Friendship Schools was able to record results as rapidly as 30 seconds or less. Zac Morford, Friendship Schools Chief Performance Officer, notes “Adding ImageMover to our K – 12 student testing process was a game-changer. The ImageMover mobile workflow platform helped us reduce the amount of time it takes to log results during the testing process by 75%.” Once results are captured, there are additional steps required to effectively communicate those results to parents, staff, and the health authorities.
“The ImageMover system automatically reports results to health authorities in real time, and shares test results with the parents of our students as soon as the tests are completed, two things that had been a huge struggle and very time consuming for us before.”
Zac Morford
Friendship Schools Chief Performance Officer
When a student has a positive test result, the goal for Friendship is to isolate them as quickly as possible and inform their parents immediately. Contacting parents during the day is not always easy. Workflow Services mitigates this challenge with real-time communication to parents and staff through preferred means of communication, normally a HIPAA-compliant text message or email. If a student is positive, the parents receive a text message or email immediately. This allows the parent to start the student pickup planning process often before the impending phone call from Friendship.
While positive result communication protocols are important for communicating to parents, the state health authorities require documentation for all positive and negative results. Reporting to health authorities is not a value-added step in the testing process and requires dedicated resources just to submit test results every day as mandated by federal regulations. “The ImageMover system automatically reports results to health authorities in real time, and shares test results with the parents of our students as soon as the tests are completed, two things that had been a huge struggle and very time consuming for us before.” states Zac Morford.
Real-time reporting of results to parents and the health authority was critical for Friendship schools. Having all results readily available added a level of confidence to the testing team. When positive cases are identified during testing, the test result recorders will use the ImageMover app to snap a photo of the BD Veritor Plus system, test cartridge, and test subject’s label. This has enabled the Friendship Schools administrative team to provide additional oversight on any resulted test. Zac Morford notes that “ImageMover is configured to address the specific requirements of our testing process and the data they help capture has allowed us to verify the human elements of the testing process and resulted in us being able to keep several kids in school who would have otherwise needed to quarantine at home.” In these rare cases where a result may be recorded incorrectly, Friendship schools quality controls allow documentation errors to be easily identified and resolved before unnecessary actions are taken.
Friendship Public Charter School navigated uncharted waters to develop a sophisticated COVID testing program to safely keep students and staff in school. Their efficient testing process and use of innovative solutions to manage testing is a replicable model for other academic institutions.