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COVID-19, State Efforts

Email to State Leaders March 23, 2020: Tech/Op Volunteers; PPE Clearinghouse

Published On March 23, 2020

By: Joanna Dornfeld

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United States of Care was founded by a diverse board and Founder’s Council around our mission to ensure that every single American has access to quality, affordable health care regardless of health status, social need, or income, which has never been more important. Like the rest of the world, our business as usual has changed. We have shifted our resources to provide immediate support for state and federal government and public response needs, leveraging our expertise, capacity, network, and resources to support effective responses to the pandemic.

This morning, I’m sharing three resources to help you manage during the COVID crisis (more details below):

ProjectN95 – a tech-enabled effort to source PPE

This weekend a tech-enabled effort – ProjectN95 – launched to connect healthcare institutions with available Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

ProjectN95 is:

  • Coordinating with PPE manufacturers globally;
  • Collecting PPE needs from hospitals;
  • Connecting hospitals directly with suppliers for orders over 100k units;
  • Coordinating with governments and other large purchases to aggregate orders of fewer than 100k units; and
  • Sharing data about needs for PPE in each state.

In the coming days and weeks, millions of units of PPE should be available for distribution. ProjectN95 is currently in the process of conducting initial diligence of the over 60 potential suppliers who cumulatively have reported a stockpile of over 100 million masks, among other PPE equipment.

ProjectN95 can connect your state government with suppliers for further diligence, negotiation, and fulfillment.

If hospitals in your state request PPE through this platform, the data collected will be used by ProjectN95 and the broader national PPE coalition to connect your government and your state’s hospitals with the PPE supplies that our network is sourcing. ProjectN95 will also share this data with you.

What you can do:

  • Fill out the government partner form on ProjectN95.com with questions or to coordinate data sharing and order aggregation.
  • Share ProjectN95.com with healthcare institutions in your state so they can request PPE directly.

US Digital Response to match top-notch, vetted technology, data, and operations professionals with governments to help tackle the problems you are facing to respond to the COVID crisis.

The U.S. Digital Response Team was started by three former U.S. Deputy CTOs (one who was a leader on the healthcare.gov rescue effort, one who founded Code for America, and one who leads the Digital Service Collaborative at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center) and a technical executive formerly from Facebook and Stripe. The purpose is to deploy tech, data and operations volunteers in states to tackle COVID-related challenges including testing, supply chain, resource deployment etc. States can learn more and sign up to seek help here. We’d welcome an opportunity to connect by phone with whomever is appropriate from your team to talk more specifically about your state’s needs.

We have heard from other state and local governments that their needs include and are beginning to spin up projects to address them:

  • Help making it easier to collect and collate data from private and public testing facilities
  • Help keeping websites and systems that are under unprecedented strain from going down (i.e., benefit application systems for unemployment insurance, etc.)
  • Help from data scientists with modeling and mapping infection data
  • Help with an online tool for the public to self-assess before going to a testing center
  • Help with appointment scheduling for tests
  • Help building/implementing a system to better collect and track data from hospitals about their bed and ventilator capacity
  • Help re-imaging and distributing laptops to EOCs
  • Help with project & general operational management, as well as supply chain and procurement expertise
  • Help managing logistics and personnel shortages

What you can do:

United States of Care COVID rapid response

USofCare is structuring our COVID response work around several core areas:

  • Creating and scaling smart solutions. Creating policy menus and ideas for consideration at state, federal, and institutional levels. Sharing best practices, policies, messaging, and innovative approaches to scale quickly to other areas.
  • Connecter. Bring people and solutions together to tackle hard problems. “Matchmaking” between supply (of expertise, models, or literal operational supplies) and demand (requests/needs from states, feds, stakeholders.)
  • Amplify. Amplify and communicate public health needs/ directives to political and business leaders, and the public at large.

We, and our Founder’s Council, are available via email, phone, and web conferencing to partner with you to solve your toughest challenges.

What you can do:

  • Contact us to talk more specifically about your state’s needs.

United States of Care thanks you for your work during this crisis and is working along side you to support your efforts. Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can help.

Best,
Joanna