Racing the pandemic – Rapidly enabling BC’s COVID-19 Travel Isolation using open source workflow technology
- Case Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of problems for governments across the world, and Canada was no different. British Columbia acted decisively to protect the people of the province, working to make sure that citizens were protected and kept informed at every step of the process.
As the province acted to stem the spread of the virus in BC, many Canadians travelling abroad needed to cut their travel short and return home as soon as possible. Unprecedented times call for extraordinary measures – the solution had to be developed quickly and be robust, while being easy to understand and use. As AOT has been already working on an open source solution around forms, workflows and related analytics, we were hired to help Service BC to build a complete COVID travel isolation management workflow to handle quarantine plans declared by Canadians returning to BC during the pandemic.
What are the main takeaways?
AOT Technologies has an Open Source Solution that helps organizations to rapidly configure and deploy electronic forms along with related workflows, analytics, and role-based access. This solution consists of a digital forms builder, Business Process Management engine, and analytical engine that can easily be integrated with existing identity management solutions.
Working with Service BC, the team at AOT Technologies was able to deliver the solution for enabling travel isolation in BC over the course of a weekend.
This free and open formsflow.ai solution is helping BC public sector projects to rapidly build line of business applications combining forms, workflows and analytics
You can get your on free and open copy of formsflow.ai solution here
Project background
As a part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic a state of emergency was declared in the province. Canadian Citizens who returned from overseas and arrived in British Columbia would be contacted by the BC government during their first 2 weeks after arrival to see how they were managing their self-isolation. An internal system was needed to streamline the complicated calling process for government staff from different organizational levels.
Who Are Service BC?
Service BC provides front line support for many of the hundreds of programs and services the BC provincial government offers to residents, businesses and visitors.
Project Summary
In order to best protect citizens and the community as a whole, Service BC required a workflow solution that gets triggered by self-isolation plan submissions. The system had to support Service BC staff to effectively communicate the required measures and process the various needs of citizens returning from abroad during the pandemic. Due to the nature of the situation, the solution had to be conceived, built, and tested in just a few days.
Solution Approach
The team at AOT Technologies approached the solution using a combination of Camunda, Keycloak, Docker, and OpenShift Container Platform. This approach is the same as the idea behind our formsflow.ai framework. The difference was that the client facing form submissions came from a separately hosted external digital form instead of form.io form.
A complex Camunda BPMN 2.0 process was created to contain all possible decision branches to support the isolation plan follow-ups. Process had integrated analytics to gain insights like resource management. The angular based workflow integrated user task forms provided the government staff with a script of essential questions to ask, and stored citizens’ answers. Forms were designed to be smart – changing the user interface layouts and changing follow-up questions based on selections made.
Our team on this project worked with Service BC to devise and build a complete solution in just 72 hours.
Result
The system ensured Canadian citizens returning from abroad understood self-isolation, received help where required, and were following their isolation plans. The response from the public was positive. The citizens were thankful and happy that the BC government demonstrated genuine care in the face of adversity by contacting everyone individually. They were appreciative and reassured by the fact that the government was focusing on the mission to support them, especially during such difficult times.
All of the positive outcomes were achieved by the combination of the dedicated work from every team member and our solution of using forms, workflows, and analytics. This project demonstrates that good and important work can be achieved in a short timeframe with the right team in place.
AOT Technologies are proud of our contribution to making the lives of citizens in BC better, especially in such trying times. The future of formsflow.ai as an open-source forms solution is hugely promising, and we hope it can continue creating positive impacts in our society.
You can access the source code of the application here.
What is formsflow.ai?
formsflow.ai is an open source solution that helps organizations to configure and deploy electronic forms along with related role-based access, workflows and analytics in a short period of time. This solution consists of a digital forms builder, Business Process Management engine and analytics engine. This containerized DevOps friendly solution can be easily deployed on-prem (to help comply with Canadian privacy laws) or on the public cloud secured with existing identity and access management systems owned by organizations. The solution uses an open source forms engine which allows staff users to self-create forms and attach to predefined or custom workflows. It also includes capabilities to extract data for analytics, SLA tracking and lifecycle management of application submissions.