When the pandemic hit, a school on the western slope of the Rockies was quick to turn to the latest technology.
“Colorado Mesa University was really willing to try new things and be really in cutting edge with what they were doing,” said Olivia Glennon, Senior Development Lead at Fathom Information Design.
The company designed two apps for the university to stay in contact with students and keep track of the constantly evolving data.
“We built both the app that the students are using called Scout, but more importantly, I think, we were building what we called Lookout, which is the administrative dashboard that pulls in not just that information but all of the other information related to COVID that they were collecting.”
The firm worked with the university and the Broad Institute, a genomic research institute where researchers from MIT and Harvard collaborate, in order to track and interpret the data about case rates and symptoms on campus.
“It was really important that we built something where we could pull in all of these clues from all different places for the administrators, the contact tracers to make decisions based on the data that was available and looking at all the clues in one place,” said Glennon.
Daily updates helped keep both the students and administrators up to date, connect students with important resources like testing and quarantine housing and identify and track sick students.
“Lookout really enabled them to see things that were happening in real time and use their judgment, use what they know that’s actually happening on the ground to make a decision about whether to send students or not.”
The move paid off; while there have been some surges in cases, there has been no rampant disease spread and the campus has been open for in-person learning since the fall, except for a planned closure between Thanksgiving and the winter holidays.
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