Melbourne's Arden Street Labs develops COVID-19 self-assessment platform for Austin Health

Microsoft partner Arden Street Labs has built a community self-assessment platform for Melbourne-based training hospital Austin Health to help monitor COVID-19 symptoms.

The Azure-hosted platform helps collect data from people arriving in the hospital to determine if they needed to come in or stay at home, and also tests COVID-19 patients’ respiratory and other targeted symptoms.

The platform also has a portal where users can access their results and also manage appointments and rescheduling.

Arden Street Labs chief technology officer Jeff Feldman said the platform’s key underpinning technologies included Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML), Azure Maps, Web Apps containers, DataBricks, PowerApps and Power BI.

“Whilst we are using Azure Databricks and Azure ML to support the key analytics capabilities built into the solutions, we’ve taken a very adverse approach putting client confidentiality at the forefront,” Feldman said.

“Therefore, everything employed from Azure has been built leveraging Azure’s security features, including highly restricted access and compartmentalised approach to data.”

Feldman told CRN that Arden Street had been working with Austin Health a few months before COVID-19 hit, originally engaging the company for an entirely different project related to the Buruli ulcer that hit Victoria recently.

The relationship then extended into building Austin Health’s innovation capability on Azure, which in turn led to the development of software to aid the fight against COVID-19.

Austin Health director of EMR and ICT services Alan Pritchard said the hospitals’ clinical personnel being directly involved in the development of the platform contributed to its success.

“The results are quite incredible - we had a roadmap that was aimed at enabling a more agile approach of developing all sorts of different features and capabilities using platforms such as Azure,” Pritchard said.

“[Arden Street’s] efforts had been the perfect case, as it not only developed one solution for us and expanded it, but actually developed a suite of solutions, all of which are iterations on the same platform.”