This Call Centre Helps Screen Arrivals In India's Airports For COVID-19 Symptoms Daily

Ever since COVID-19 first broke out in a market in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China, the whole world has been proactive in preventing cases from entering their country, and even if they do, help it to not spread it among other people.

Altruist

In India however, a company called Altruist took a rather different approach: Deploying call centres to keep tabs on suspected COVID-19 cases coming to India as well as helping people who had the symptoms to get the necessary help in time.

We got to speak with Mr. Sachin Jain, Director at Altruist Technologies, to learn about how their call centres helped in screening thousands arriving at airports in India and help prevent the spreading of the novel coronavirus.

Implementing the setup in just 48 hours

Sachin shared with us how the entire system was established in just 48 hours,

He explained, "Around 2nd week of March, we started getting the news of COVID-19 cases emerging in different parts of India. Since this was a concern as it was going to affect lives and businesses at large, we started thinking of some idea which could help the country in stopping the spread of this pandemic.¡±

He added, ¡°Fortunately, we got the opportunity to contribute to the cause directly with the Government of Karnataka. We had a quick discussion with the government officials on how the virus can be controlled only if we can accurately track the infected hosts. Hence, as a first step, we quickly planned to start tracking the status of all the international travellers entering the state. The whole setup was implemented and went live within 48 hours!¡±

Tracking process Stage 1: Collecting Data

We were curious to know how the entire process works, so Sachin explained that the entire approach is laid out in multiple stages.

He said, ¡°Government collected the self-reporting forms from the incoming travellers, estimated at 50,000 in the first half of March and incremental 1500 forms every day for the next few weeks. The forms were digitized and such digitized data with name, contact no, date of arrival and the port of arrival were fed into an outbound IVR (Interactive Voice Response) dialer to make calls. These calls were made to these international travellers every day until 15 days of their arrival in India.¡±

¡°This was the first step in which the traveller had to provide his health status ¨C Healthy OR any signs of cold, cough, fever, breathing problems along with his/her age (Above or below 60). The travellers were also advised on the basic guidelines of home quarantine.¡±

Altruist

Tracking process Stage 2: Analysis

Sachin revealed that the data now collected by the IVR was analysed by the Ministry of Health.

He said, ¡°Depending on the priority, these travellers were then contacted by our call centre agents to take more details from them and advise them with corrective actions. These included providing them details of ambulance services, directly connecting them with the nearest public health hospitals, etc.¡±

He added, ¡°The people who were suggested to be in home quarantine, were contacted multiple times till the 28th day of their arrival to keep a track of their health status. Once we started getting data about Covid positive patients, the process of contact tracing started.

Tracking process Stage 3: Contact Tracing

Sachin states contact tracing is a little like detective work, ¡°Trained staff interview people who have been diagnosed with a contagious disease to figure out who they may have recently been in contact with. Then, they go tell those people they may have been exposed, and mostly encouraging them to quarantine themselves to prevent spreading the disease any further. Think of it as one-part public health work, and one-part investigation.¡±

Dealing with false positives

With such a high volume of data, the risk of false positives is always present. But Altruist had a rather interesting approach to this. Sachin explained, ¡°The call centre agents were quickly trained to deal with people¡¯s behavioural aspects, and also to make sure that they could explain to the travellers the importance of sharing the correct health status and travel history. In all such calls, it was clearly explained that the data will remain confidential. As per our analysis, we were able to get the correct status of at least 80-90% travellers.¡±

Altruist

India is the perfect playground for startups

When we asked Sachin about the challenges he faced while setting up a startup to cater the people in India, he said, ¡°India is unique in terms of challenges and opportunities due to its huge population, changing dynamics and the available talent base. We have always seen India as just the right place to develop, experiment and deliver world-class solutions to the world. It provides a perfect playing field not only for developing solutions with its talent pool (once well-trained), but also for testing results across different behavioural or user patterns.¡±

Motivation to keep going forward

Sachin mentioned how satisfied he felt by providing employment to a considerable amount of people under his wing at a time when people are losing jobs, stating,

¡°Being able to provide employment to over 15000 citizens of India, and training nearly half of this number every year gives a lot of satisfaction to us. Whenever we acquire any business, we hire all new talent required for that business from India, with a focus on freshers and applicants from a non-metro background.¡±