Thursday, August 19, 2021

Running a vaccine clinic? There's an app for that

By Alana Rigby. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

Ryan Tennant is interested in bridging health care and engineering. From co-op terms and research projects at Sunnybrook and Sick Kids hospitals to developing a medical device at a company in Switzerland, he’s always looking to use his biomedical engineering education to improve the world around him.

Even so, Tennant didn’t expect that, less than a year into his PhD, he’d be launching an app for staff in COVID-19 vaccine clinics. In July, he began pilot testing the app at the Health Sciences Campus (HSC) Clinic, a regional vaccination clinic led by the Centre for Family Medicine and hosted in the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy.  

A BASc and MASc graduate from Systems Design Engineering at Waterloo, Tennant studies human factors engineering, a branch of the discipline that examines how tools, machines and systems are designed to reflect the capabilities and limitations of their users. 

“Given my background, my co-supervisor professor Catherine Burns and I met with pharmacy professor Kelly Grindrod and Moses Tetui, her post-doc researcher,” says Tennant. “The clinic had just opened, and Kelly described some of the workflow challenges involved. I quickly saw that a human factors perspective could help support the vaccine roll-out in the region.” 

The HSC Clinic gives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, meaning it has a complex workflow due to the vaccine’s temperature and dilution requirements. Combine this with the ever-evolving guidelines around who is eligible for a vaccine, where vaccines are available and whether walk-in appointments are supported, and designing the most efficient clinic becomes more challenging. 

“In some ways, running a clinic is like a math problem that you’re doing over and over again because your inputs keep changing,” Tennant says. “Talking to the staff and observing their tasks, I learned about several variables that can influence the final output of the equation.” 

The biggest challenge Tennant observed was the potential for wasted vaccine. Once a vial of the Pfizer vaccine is punctured, it must be used within a six-hour window. While considering several variables, the clinic team makes critical decisions about opening extra vials. To make decisions, the staff must track and communicate information across multiple teams, including the volunteers and check-in staff who coordinate patient flow, the security staff tracking walk-ins, the pharmacy team that prepares the vaccines for use and the vaccination team that gets doses into arms. 

Efficient and effective communication is critical to manage end-of-day dose decisions, and Tennant was determined to provide a solution. 

“They needed a digital tool that could be shared and updated in real time across all teams,” he says. “Something that puts all staff on the same page with respect to the numbers, automates their calculations and supports human situational awareness to help predict their end-of-day doses.” 

After observing regional clinics and speaking with clinic staff, Tennant went to work coding. A week later, he had a prototype app to present to the team at the HSC Clinic. Since then, he’s submitted ethics amendments, gathered feedback from the many partners involved in the clinic and rolled out updates to improve usability.  

The app is now in beta testing at the HSC Clinic and was recently piloted at the large Every Dose Counts vaccination drive. 

“It’s a really simple app, but the reception has been overwhelmingly positive,” he says. “The app was designed to help alleviate the stress of end-of-day doses – to ensure that there are fewer or no doses that go unused.”  

Tennant continues to improve the app and integrate new features that support clinic workflow. He is also working with the Region and other partners to explore rolling it out in other locations where it may be useful. The goal is to also design a tool that is adaptable and may be of use in future vaccine rollouts.  

“Working in partnership with the amazing nurses, pharmacists, clinic staff and volunteers has been an eye-opening experience,” says Tennant, who also volunteers at the HSC Clinic with his family. “I wouldn’t have been able to build this without their support and willingness to let me observe the ups and downs of their day.” 

The research project was developed in partnership with the Region and its vaccine clinics and with team members from the University of Waterloo, Grand River Hospital, and St. Mary’s Hospital.

Waterloo dominates 2021 ICPC North America Division Championship

Dark green indicates the team was first to solve the problem, light green indicates the team solved the problem, and orange indicates that the problem was attempted.

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

The University of Waterloo crushed the competition at the 2021 International Collegiate Programming Contest North America Division Championship held virtually on August 14, 2021, finishing solidly in first place. 

“This is an incredible result,” said Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Troy Vasiga, who coaches the team with his colleague Professor Ondřej Lhoták. “Waterloo solved 12 of 13 problems, finishing in the top spot, and beating teams from MIT, Georgia Tech, Swarthmore College, University of British Columbia, University of California at San Diego, and University of Toronto.”

As one of the top 19 teams at the 2021 ICPC North America Championship, Waterloo’s team consisting of Ildar Gainullin (2A computer science), Jason Yuen (4B computer science) and Wesley Leung (4A software engineering) will advance to the 45th Annual ICPC World Finals. 

“The level of competition in this contest is fierce, which makes the team’s performance — solving 12 out of 13 problems, where all other contenders solved 9 or fewer — simply outstanding,” said Cheriton School of Computer Science Acting Director Jo Atlee. “Congratulations, and bravo to the team and their coaches.”

“Both Troy and I are extremely proud of the team members,” said Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ondřej Lhoták. “They exceeded our already high expectations, and they worked exceptionally well as a virtual team that has not been able to train together over the past year because of the pandemic.”

“We worked hard during the contest, and the hard work is paying off,” adds Ildar, a second-year computer science student. “We are excited and proud to represent the University of Waterloo at the upcoming World Finals.”
 
Although this will be Ildar’s first opportunity to compete at the World Finals, Jason Yuen was a member of the Waterloo team that competed at the 2018–19 ICPC World Finals and Wesley Leung is a member of the Waterloo team heading to the 2019–20 ICPC World Finals, a competition tentatively scheduled to take place in October 2021.

Waterloo’s teams were sponsored by Jane Street, an international firm that trades a wide range of financial products.

About the International Collegiate Programming Contest

The International Collegiate Programming Contest is the oldest, largest and most prestigious university-level algorithmic programming contest in the world. Each year, more than 50,000 students from more than 3,000 universities across 111 countries compete in regional competitions to earn a spot at the World Finals.

Volunteer coaches prepare their teams with intense training and instruction in algorithms, programming and teamwork strategy. Typically huddled around a single computer, teams of three attempt to solve eight to twelve complex real-world problems within a gruelling five-hour deadline. Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds and build software systems that solve the problems.

In ICPC competitions, teams of three students represent their university in multiple levels of regional competition. Success at one level leads to an invitation to the next. Each region progresses differently, but the end result is the same — the best teams advance. The final regional contest determines the teams advancing to the World Finals.

Waterloo’s proud history at the International Collegiate Programming Contest

The University of Waterloo is the only Canadian university to win the International Collegiate Programming Competition World Finals, taking the prized title in 1994 and again in 1999.

A passion for programming: An interview with Professor Ondřej Lhoták

Read a feature article about Professor Ondřej Lhoták, who was a member of the Waterloo team that won the 1999 ICPC World Championship and now coaches Waterloo’s teams with his colleague, Professor Troy Vasiga.

Next anti-racism book club set for September 21

This article was originally published in the Catalyst newsletter.

The Anti-racism book club is an ongoing PART initiative, which helps to promote education, awareness, and a deeper understanding of race, culture, and ethnicity across campus. Since July 2021, each month a significant cross-section of the campus community has engaged in discussions about race and racism and practical solutions to confront and dismantle institutionalized racism. 

In September, Professor Frankie Condon, who has conducted extensive research in anti-racism rhetoric and anti-racism pedagogy, will lead the discussion of Robin DiAngelo’s, White Fragility (2018), the New York Times bestseller that gained international prominence in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in the US.

“The book is both important and flawed,” said Professor Condon. “Robin DiAngelo, a long-time diversity educator, draws on her experience delivering diversity training to white folks, who respond defensively to systemic, institutional, and individual analyses of racism, white privilege, and white supremacy. White Fragility has been both lauded for its acknowledgment of White performances of fragility, long observed by anti-racist activists and educators, and criticized for its over-determination of White racialization and representation of powerlessness among Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour.”

What can participants expect from the third book club? Professor Condon believes the book, and its flaws, pose a powerful challenge, which, she says includes understanding roles and responsibilities (individual and collective) for acknowledging historical racism and white supremacy and becoming accountable to Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour for anti-racism without expecting or insisting that they teach us how to be right.

“DiAngelo is responding to a challenge by BIPOC anti-racist activists for White anti-racists to take on the work of educating other Whites so that BIPOC activists won’t have to,” the professor explained. “Of course, taking up such a challenge is fraught with the risk of both learningful and catastrophic failures. As problematic as DiAngelo’s book may be, we cannot learn from her wisdom or her mistakes without reading and talking about them,” she concluded.

Professor Condon hopes that participants attending the book club discussion will come not only for affirmation of their convictions and commitments, but also for robust and difficult dialogue about the roles and responsibilities of White folks in anti-racism efforts. She anticipates advancing community and solidarity that will extend well beyond the conversation and be carried forward into the ongoing collective anti-racism work at the University of Waterloo.

Register for the September Anti-racism book club on the PART website.