When the University of New Hampshire (UNH) administration needed a COVID-19 testing solution to enable students’ safe return to campus in fall 2020, they turned to Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) for help.
ET&S provided a mobile app solution — Wildcat Pass — to enable students, faculty and staff to show if they were compliant with testing and safe behaviors to allow for campus access; created a secure solution to store tens of thousands of test results used for reporting by university administration to provide information for critical decisions; created an for the University community and general public to view for daily testing results to show the effectiveness of all COVID-19 related efforts.
ET&S relied on collaborations between its newly constructed service lines during the heat of summer, working long hours and weekends through ever-changing conditions to find a solution to enable students to return to campus.
Here is the breakdown of how the UNH COVID-19 testing plan unfolded regarding ET&S’ involvement.
Data Collection Forms
The Research Computing Software Development team is part of ET&S and have been involved from the very start of the pandemic, first creating an employee health attestation form in spring 2020 to ensure staff were following basic safety measures such as taking their temperature daily, confirming there were symptom-free and wearing masks while on campus. The form was developed using existing UNHCEMS software as its backbone, originally created in 2000 to manage UNH’s chemical inventory, safety data sheets, hazardous waste stream and radioactive materials. Over the years, this team grew UNHCEMS to meet other needs at UNH, and many other universities adopted this software for their own use.
The development team has continued to support a variety of other data collection needs by leveraging Microsoft Forms. All forms are accessible through UNH single sign-on and have backend capability to feed
myWildcat Pass
With the health attestation form in place, UNH needed an easy way for university community members to show compliance with testing and necessary form submissions to help keep the campus safe. The Software Development team developed myWildcat Pass, a mobile application tied into UNHCEMS which leverages testing and form information to create an easy way for students, faculty and staff to show if their pass is valid by displaying a unique image each day, including color and background changes, to ensure passes aren’t forged. If the pass is invalid, the message is displayed with the steps needed to obtain a valid pass.
Patrick Messer is Director of Research Computing. Once his Software Development team stood up the health attestation form, UNH involved them in all aspects of COVID-19 testing.
“The myWildcat Pass app is an easy form of communication for students that they’re comfortable using,” Messer said. “It leverages a way to show them we’re doing the right thing and to assure them that if they come to class, other people in the classroom are compliant as well.”
Data Warehouse
The Software Development team created the COVID-19 Data Warehouse, which is a series of secure network servers used to store data feeds from multiple sources These feeds are used for the myWildcast Pass application to show whether or not university community members are compliant and to create reports which are shared with UNH administrators to inform important decisions. The Data Warehouse is a critical piece to the UNH COVID-19 testing puzzle, as the information contained within is highly sensitive and is subject to HIPPA laws.
The window to create and greenlight the Data Warehouse was tight, and variables changed seemingly every day. The Research Computing team’s experience with sensitive data allowed them to quickly pull a team together. The results have been positive.
“The COVID-19 environment was constantly changing, Messer said. “It’s tough to write solid software code under those conditions, but the software has been rock-solid. And although we’ve had some challenges, the fact that we are up and running in the lab was able to process all these tests, without any technical failures is a testament to the skills of the team.”
COVID-19 Dashboard
Jackie Snow is Senior Director, Center for Data, Analytics, and Technology Alliance (DATA). Snow’s team worked closely with the Software Development team to create public-facing COVID-19 dashboards for Keene State College (KSC), Plymouth State University (PSU) and UNH. DATA also provided critical data analysis which informed KSC, PSU, and UNH decision-makers before the fall 2020 opening and throughout the pandemic.
In ordinary circumstances, DATA has full access to all the data they analyze and present, but in the case of COVID-19, they had to quickly build trust with Research Computing, as the data is sensitive due to HIPPA laws. On the flip side, although the Software Development team works with data all the time, they aren’t necessarily in touch with the business processes due to the context of the data, so DATA was able to guide them through some of the nuances due to their vast experience, resulting in a unique collaboration.
Snow’s team had to pivot many times during their initial involvement after input from UNH leadership. Throughout the duration of the pandemic, the collaborations have stood the test of time.
“This project has been very successful,” Snow said. “It's because of a lot of amazing work that people have done. People worked significant, long hours over many holidays. And other work still had to happen. So while this effort was a priority, staff in many of these groups had other things that just couldn't be dropped. But, somehow, we managed to pull it off and it really just speaks to the tremendous work and dedication of the team involved.”
Starting in November 2020, UNH created its own COVID-19 testing lab, a group effort led by the College of Life Sciences & Agriculture, Health & Wellness and Communication and Public Affairs. Testing is now conducted onsite and the results are often available in a matter of hours instead of the days it took when the University had to use third-party vendors to provide testing. ET&S continues to provide the data the University needs to provide a safe return of students to campus
