Rapid Pandemic Response: Building a COVID-19 Testing Platform
Challenges
Rapid mobilization to support COVID-19 testing in Spring 2020. The operational infrastructure doesn't exist. Manual paperwork, fragmented reporting, and inconsistent data capture created delays in results and public reporting.
Solutions
Results
Mobilize Rapid Response
When a global pandemic strikes, the organizations best positioned to respond aren't necessarily those with the most resources — they're those with the right technology partners. In spring 2020, as COVID-19 began spreading rapidly across the United States, a global pharmaceutical leader made the decision to stand up large-scale testing programs for healthcare professionals and their communities. The challenge was significant: turning intent into operational reality, fast, with no existing digital infrastructure to build from.
New Era Technology was engaged to do exactly that. Within weeks, our team designed, built, and deployed a secure, end-to-end testing platform — enabling digital patient intake, real-time result tracking, and de-identified public health reporting at a moment when speed and accuracy were quite literally critical. This is how we did it.
When Every Hour Counted
In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, healthcare organizations and government agencies were urgently seeking ways to track infections and protect frontline healthcare workers. A global pharmaceutical leader moved quickly to provide COVID-19 testing to healthcare professionals and the broader community — but the operational infrastructure to manage the surge in testing simply did not yet exist.
Early testing sites relied heavily on manual paperwork, fragmented reporting processes, and inconsistent data capture. The result: significant delays in delivering test results and reporting infection rates at a moment when every hour counted. New Era Technology was engaged to rapidly design and deploy a digital platform capable of capturing patient testing data, enabling individuals to check their results, and providing anonymized infection statistics for public health reporting — all within an extraordinarily compressed timeframe during the first critical weeks of the pandemic.
Precision Under Pressure
New Era assembled a rapid-response team of architects, developers, and DevOps specialists to design and launch a solution capable of supporting high-volume testing while ensuring data privacy and full compliance with evolving reporting requirements. Working in close partnership with the client's stakeholders, the team iterated continuously — adapting the solution to support shifting operational needs as testing protocols and reporting expectations changed week by week.
The key tactics and deliverables included:
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Designing and deploying a secure web application to capture COVID-19 PCR testing data for individuals being tested
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Creating role-based interfaces for both testing administrators and members of the public seeking test results
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Developing a scanning and intake workflow to digitise paperwork and streamline drive-through testing operations
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Implementing data de-identification processes to remove personally identifiable information while enabling meaningful statistical reporting
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Building infrastructure to support government and public health reporting of real-time infection rates
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Enabling rapid DevOps mobilisation to stand up environments and deploy updates at the speed demanded by the early pandemic response
Within weeks of the pandemic's onset, the solution enabled our client to support early testing efforts with a fully operational digital platform — streamlining patient intake, tracking testing data in real time, and giving individuals clear visibility into their results. At a time when infection statistics were critical to shaping the national public health response, the platform also enabled de-identified data reporting that contributed to broader monitoring of infection rates during the early, most uncertain stages of the outbreak.
- Digital intake and result tracking operational within weeks of pandemic onset
- De-identified infection data reporting enabled for public health monitoring
- Role-based access deployed for administrators and patients seeking results
- Rapid DevOps mobilisation demonstrated ability to deliver under crisis conditions
Most importantly, this engagement demonstrated the power of rapid digital innovation under crisis conditions — mobilizing technology, design, and DevOps capabilities to support frontline healthcare efforts during one of the most challenging and unpredictable moments in recent history. When speed, security, and accuracy mattered most, New Era delivered.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sensitive health data requires a security and compliance model that is built into the platform from the start, not added later. That means limiting data access by role, encrypting information in transit and at rest, maintaining complete audit trails, and designing workflows that reduce unnecessary exposure of protected information while supporting fast, accurate reporting.
- Apply role-based access controls so only authorized users can view, process, or approve patient data.
- Encrypt data in transit and at rest to protect information across systems, users, and reporting workflows.
- Maintain detailed audit logs to track who accessed data, what changed, and when actions occurred.
- Build workflow controls that support secure sample handling, result validation, and report delivery with minimal manual risk.
- Align platform design and operating procedures with applicable healthcare and privacy requirements from the beginning.
Let’s Build What’s Next—Together
Today’s challenges don’t sit in one category. Neither should your solutions. When infrastructure, digital transformation, and security work together, complexity fades and progress accelerates.