Kick-starting economies while keeping people safe

CHALLENGE

Returning to work. Protecting employees. Safeguarding customers

Keeping employees and customers safe as workplaces reopen is one of the critical challenges that business leaders consider as they confront COVID-19's economic impact.

Though it's first and foremost a public-health issue, the biggest challenge we face in preventing the spread of COVID-19 is information. We wear masks, we exercise social distancing, and governments implement lockdowns because we simply don't know who's infectious.

The arrival of several approved vaccines is a sign of better times ahead. Governments are working round the clock to make vaccines widely available, inoculate a critical mass of people, and address efficacy issues for variant strains. But in the meantime, reopening the economy with confidence requires a robust system to administer cost-effective antigen screens that produce rapid, accurate results.

Doing so at scale, however, is a complex undertaking. It requires a rigorous review of screening technologies and careful orchestration of supply chains, regulatory regimes, data-led analysis, and implementation on a widespread basis.

SOLUTION

Coming together to overcome challenges

Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a nonprofit organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science-and-technology-based companies, established the Rapid Screening Consortium to keep employees and customers safe as workplaces reopen. CDL's mission is to accelerate the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. And in August 2020, Genpact joined as a founding Consortium member to work alongside businesses including Air Canada, Scotiabank, and Shoppers Drug Mart.

The Consortium aims to roll out a large-scale COVID-19 screening program to administer cost-effective screening, produce results within 15 minutes, and deliver a false-negative infectiousness rate of less than 10%. It needed end-to-end process expertise to deliver the program and, more importantly, to capture and assess the data accurately to continually improve outcomes.

Our expertise was called upon to develop and deliver intelligent, data-driven cost frameworks and modeling capabilities so that the program could be rolled out across Canada.

The Consortium executed its work in four phases:

Phase one: Assessing the test landscape with a standardized approach
The Consortium's first step was to assess the potential of a complex and constantly evolving universe of tests – many of which had not yet been approved by regulators. Genpact examined the possible line-item costs of administering each test and built a single framework to standardize budgeting and cost reporting across all test use cases. This allowed us to accurately estimate costs across multiple screening site locations and screening protocols during the feasibility phase.

Phase two: A data-driven approach to determine feasibility
With the framework in place, the Consortium narrowed the universe of potential tests to those that were most feasible. We worked with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) to develop an intelligent cost-estimate and reporting model for the selected tests and their delivery scenarios.

With our analytics expertise and process-design experience, we integrated an exhaustive list of variables – including population, number of screens to be executed, labor costs, and testing protocols – into the cost model. Six iterations later, the refined model automated more than 140 screening cost estimates for member organizations and, armed with all the information they needed, the pilot phase began.

Phase three: Piloting the program
Screening pilots are well underway for members' employees. And we have given them the tools to capture and report budgeted versus actual cost data to paint an accurate picture of the cost impact of different screening scenarios. They range from screens administered by a medical or trained professional, guided in-person or remote self-testing, and a completely outsourced approach.

Phase four: Widespread implementation
The Consortium is in its final phase of scaling, and with more than 137,000 rapid tests administered across 137 pilot sites, numbers are growing each week. It's on its ninth cohort of pilot site preparation, with more than 75 member organizations. The cost model we built with the CPPIB continues to be used across pilot sites for budgeting and cost reporting to inform us of trends and best practices.

By learning as we go and sharing information, we're building accuracy and confidence in the system as we stride toward a screening process that costs less than $1 per test without sacrificing effectiveness.

IMPACT

Sharing information to learn faster and better

Information is critical to overcoming the pandemic's health challenges and its impact on the economy. By sharing information across companies, we're learning faster and better allowing the Consortium to move closer to a scalable rapid screening program. Underpinned by our data-driven frameworks and analytical modeling, we delivered:

• A robust standardized framework to assess screening costs across 70 initial pilot sites
• 140 automated cost estimates enabling Consortium members to successfully launch their pilots and complete more than 14,000 screens in the first 7 weeks
• An agile scenario-planning model to assess the impact of different screening methods on costs, time, and accuracy
• A rigorous reporting methodology to compare actual versus budgeted costs and quickly identify and address line items impacting costs to bring us closer to target
• Key components and process flows for an operational playbook to guide health authorities in Canada and around the world

NEXT STEPS

Taking lessons to new markets

Genpact continues to play an essential role in the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium. We're refining the frameworks, models, and reporting from the pilots and implementation while onboarding future pilot cohorts and participating organizations. Our work here is far from done.

As the battle against COVID-19 progresses, we're also leading the charge with the US Rapid Action Consortium. Alongside the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, we're ramping up our efforts to share the lessons learned for the good of the public and economy. And we've combined forces with the COVID Collaborative, a US national assembly tackling the crisis, to deepen the group's expertise in the fields of health, education, and the economy. The Consortium's mission: to rapidly accelerate the safe reopening of the US economy.

The CDL Rapid Screening Consortium and US Rapid Action Consortium illustrate the greater good that companies achieve when they come together, collaborating with shared purpose and applying their unique capabilities to solve the challenge of a lifetime