On coronavirus and collaboration
Nell posts reflections on her CEO journey on Medium. Photo credit to @creatingscience !
Over the 20 weeks that have passed since the early days of quarantine, our team at Folia has had the unique opportunity to participate in a collaborative volunteer effort designed to rapidly identify, validate, and implement the best at-home coronavirus tests for Massachusetts healthcare workers and residents.
This experience has been a study in what our healthcare system can achieve when we work quickly, with agility, toward a common goal. The speed at which this group has made progress has been pleasantly surprising, and has caused us to pause and wonder why it’s so unusual. Incredibly, it’s all happened without any economic incentive for the collaborators — offering no grant awards, no salary support, and creating something of a distraction from our day jobs.
The initiative (MGB COVID-19 Direct-to-Consumer Task Force) was spun up in little more than a week in mid-March. Decisions on the goals and operations of the group were made in hours or days, when they might otherwise have taken weeks (or months!). Volunteers were welcomed with open arms, Slack groups were created, and the work of identifying high-performing candidates for at-home antigen & antibody tests for COVID-19 began shortly thereafter.
We ended up with a team of individuals from many different backgrounds, with a wide range of perspectives. For this Task Force, individual contributors were pulled together by a shared feeling of urgency, a desire to ‘do something’ in the face of uncertainty and crisis, and the conviction that at-home testing will be a critical component of a successful coronavirus response. Variety in contributors’ backgrounds, skills, opinions, and roles arose naturally from the broad call for support. Our team at Folia naturally took on the role of data management & advocating for the needs of patients & caregivers in an at-home setting; others lent their epidemiological skills or biomedical know-how to the effort.
The task force made progress fast. The team’s daily meeting time was attended with incredible consistency, which ensured coordination and discipline unlike anything I’ve seen since my high school jazz band days. In less than six weeks, our team developed a list of at-home antibody tests (more than 170) from a worldwide scan, conducted secondary research to assess the viability of these tests for broad-scale use, established contact with the manufacturers of the most viable candidates, agreed upon terms for additional validation testing, and published the results of our preliminary work. Now, only 4 months in, we’re working alongside a new group of volunteers to complete the validation work at a dedicated lab space. All-in-all, within 6 months, this group will have completed a rigorous review resulting in a clear path for decision-makers to ensure high-quality, accessible at-home antibody testing, and all of this on a part-time volunteer basis.
As we look back upon this experience after the crisis has faded, I hope that we will remember how possible it was to cut through bureaucratic processes, align on common goals, and quickly get to work on building something meaningful. Healthcare needs more of this — what could we achieve with the opioid crisis, with similar operational principles? Why have we so infrequently held ourselves to this standard of urgency and goal-oriented collaboration, until forced by a global pandemic?
I hope that as we move forward, our community of healthcare innovators will stop using the excuse that it’s simply not possible to make progress faster, and remember what we were able to achieve — by working together — in 2020.