Technology Transformation
Let’s face it, virtually all of us will have taken a Covid test at some point over the past couple of years. But what happens to the data if and when you test positive? Where does it go?
Well, for nearly 10 years, results for infectious diseases and, most recently, Covid, have been housed in the Second Generation Surveillance System (SGSS), a BAE Systems-designed reporting system used by what was Public Health England (PHE) to track and report on the spread of infectious diseases. Crucial to its operation is its algorithm, which is designed to group together different individual tests for the same person, thereby avoiding multiple counts of the same disease with the same individual.
When the pandemic hit, the SGSS initially coped well but, as case numbers continued to spiral and the data became absolutely core to the public health response, the system’s 10 year old capacity of no more than 20,000 test results a day had become insufficient.
And that’s where BAE Systems came in.
In just nine months, and operating under a fierce media and regulatory spotlight, our engineering upgrades led to integration with six external health systems, and a seamless migration to the cloud which resulted in greater resilience and vastly improved capacity from 18,000 test results per day to 200,000.
The critical data extracts and reports that SGSS produces every morning were delivered on schedule to the highest levels of government throughout.
View the BAE Systems Digital Intelligence profile in the MCA Members Directory.