Case Study

Davidson College Innovates COVID-19 Testing Process with SnapLogic

Davidson College Backstory

Founded in 1837, Davidson College is ranked amongst the strongest and most selective private liberal arts colleges. It enrolls 1,983 students from 48 states and 47 countries. Of those students, 95 percent live on campus and about 25 percent participate in 21 NCAA Division I sports. The college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars.

The Challenge

Davidson College serves 2,000 students and up to 800 knowledge workers. Five years ago, their IT department was restructured to become a centralized, strategic partner to deliver value across the college. With an IT staff of 40, and some auxiliary IT campus partners, the college deployed a new application integration strategy and chose SnapLogic as its integration as a service platform of choice. SnapLogic was used to integrate more than 200 apps in their service catalog.

At Davidson, 95% of the students study and live on campus. When COVID-19 hit, the college was faced with the need to determine how to safely remain open, since distance learning was not an option. They implemented a plan to test every student and staff member once a week. The challenge was how to automate a COVID-19 symptom and testing tracker that would ensure compliance.

The Solution

The IT team was given less than 10 days to create and deploy a system that would accomplish this. The COVID-19 testing site would be set up in the ticket booths in their sports arena to make use of the enclosed, plexiglass spaces and queue lines. The question was how would they track, monitor and ensure compliance for 2,000 people every single week?

Using Kuali Build, a low code form and workflow automation platform for higher ed, they connected to SnapLogic to integrate Kuali with other applications to create a unique COVID-19 test and surveillance tracking system. To use the system, those getting tested would swipe their identity card, which triggered a task to complete a web form with their information. IT developers used a series of SnapLogic pipelines to populate a secure Redis cache with relevant directory information and PII for students, faculty, and staff.

By querying that cache, the testing form was able to match each student or employee’s card identifier to their testing information in under 100 milliseconds. Upon form submission, another SnapLogic pipeline sent the matched results to a reporting database. A final set of SnapLogic pipelines enabled a robust compliance and reconciliation process, producing a list of students who should have tested but didn’t, shouldn’t have tested but did, and so on.

When combined with symptom tracking data in a dashboard, the attendance tracking process allowed public health staff to make data-driven decisions, follow up on outliers, and keep the campus safe.

“As we fine-tuned the tracking system and the processes, we were able to get all our students to come back to campus in the Fall 2020” said Mills.

Business Outcomes

Throughout the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, Davidson College completed 77,000 COVID-19 tests. They were able to automate the process to the degree that it took 50 seconds for a testee to check in, get tested and exit, further minimizing potential exposure to COVID-19. “The biggest thing that confronting this challenge did for us in IT was validate our integration strategy. This pushed us to work with real-time data and rapid response and confirmed that our strategy was on track,” said Mills.

With immunization rates at acceptable levels, Davidson College is no longer running its COVID-19 testing program. However, they will be using the process to replace a costly check-in/logging system they previously implemented.