LNS - Covid-19 test scheduling system

About the customer

The Laboratoire National de Santé (LNS) is a public healthcare institution operating under the supervision of the Ministry of Health in Luxembourg. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and to support Luxembourg’s large-scale national testing strategy, LNS opened two drive-through testing centres, one situated in Dudelange, the other in Kirchberg which opened at the end of 2020.

The purpose of the LNS is to develop analytical and scientific expertise related to the prevention, diagnosis and monitoring of human diseases and to ensure the role of a national control or reference laboratory as well as to carry out forensic tasks. The institution also contributes to the development, harmonization and promotion of technical laboratory methods in close collaboration with local and foreign analytical laboratories. Within the scope of its responsibilities, the LNS also develops research and teaching activities in collaboration with ad hoc partners in Luxembourg and abroad.

With its modern infrastructure and the recent evolution of medical and analytical sciences since its move to Dudelange in 2013, the LNS is an ambitious laboratory with innovative projects that increase its expertise in public health.

www.lns.lu

The challenge

The challenge was that LNS had a paper-based scheduling system for organizing the large number of tests. So, the Institute called on Arηs Spikeseed to develop a digital system in order to improve efficiency and go paperless for good.

The project - Phase 1

First, Arηs Spikeseed developed an online appointment booking solution, through which the appointments are made in advance via a dedicated platform.

The individuals to be tested must then drive to the LNS premises at the scheduled time – with their code and the medical prescription authorizing the sample collection – for them to receive their nasal swab test.

The solution is fully serverless and hosted on AWS. All static assets are stored on Amazon S3 and the API relies on Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. Everything being fronted by Amazon CloudFront for caching and DDoS mitigation.

Furthermore, information provided by the patient are kept for 7 days and then automatically cleaned up using Amazon DynamoDB Time To Live feature.

An outstanding aspect of this project is that Arηs Spikeseed worked at lightning-speed: from the call for tender to implementation of the solution took only 4 days!

The project - Phase 2

In a second phase, Arηs Spikeseed digitized the overall test reports, which are now sent via SMS to the mobile phone number provided by the patient. The patient receives the report within 24 hours; while in the former paper-based system, reports were delivered by courier after several days.

To date, about 44.000 reports have been downloaded, 130.000 text messages have been sent and 26.000 single connections to the portal have been registered.

This phase of the project was executed very rapidly too: just 3 week elapsed between the call for service and the solution’s delivery.

LNS will keep Arηs Spikeseed’s solution for other testing beyond the Covid-19 testing. The client keeps all the provided IT infrastructure onsite (‘on-premises’).

Success factors

The success of the project can be attributed to several factors which were key prerequisites in LNS’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Most importantly, Arηs Spikeseed and LNS established mutual trust, which propelled the project forward quickly and smoothly. Indeed, the solution has been implemented in 2 phases, in virtually no time at all.

Practically, the implementation of a common JIRA cloud and daily virtual stand ups between both parties helped embracing change and adopt agile development principles and good practices.

And finally technically, the multilinguistic, the security (pen testing) and UX best practices were entirely guaranteed by a pool of multi-skilled team which drove the project to success.

What the customer says...

We developed a great partnership with ARHS Spikeseed and their dedication to the development of the test scheduling system they developed for LNS’ centers is evident in all aspects of it. We particularly appreciated their speed of execution. The COVID-19 pandemic constituted an unprecedented challenge and a coordinated and comprehensive strategy with such a IT partner was necessary to deal with our urgent needs. ARHS Spikeseed teams have been committed to do everything necessary to meet this challenge on scope and on time ! Yannick Kirschhoffer, IT Manager at LNS