Amplify

The lack of efficient nationwide administration has left healthcare workers and local coronavirus initiatives unable to cope with the flux of patients and related needs. In many locations, basic necessities such as masks, sanitizer, and gloves still remain exclusive. On the flip side, many locals retain these items along with helping hands, time and energy and willingly want to aid professionals. In order to bring these two sides together, Amplify leverages a web platform designed for institution and initiatives to ask for donations and volunteers through text bases messages. Locals can sign up to receive these text messages from any number of initiatives in their vicinity. We hope that bringing communities together to create an informal supply chain can relieve some of the pressure faced by efforts battling the coronavirus and deliver about better healthcare outcomes locally and beyond.

Nearly 3 months into the outbreak of COVID-19 in the US, many hospitals, initiatives and organizations are in need of support, whether that be in the form of monetary donations, supply donations, brain power or man power. We attribute this core problem to lacking medical equipment supply chains and our politicians' failure to efficiently allocate money and resources through law and policy. While we may not target the problem directly, there are alternative solutions that can alleviate this problem. In our local communities are people that are wanting to help in the fight against COVID-19, but are unsure of how to. Currently, there is no streamlined platform for communication between people that are seeking help and initiatives in need of help. The energy, time, and material wealth of local communities are a powerful resource that is not currently being tapped into in an efficient standardized manner.

Our solution concept takes the form of a web application where vetted health organizations and initiatives can send mass text messages to indicate need for supplies/help and residents can sign up to receive alerts from organizations in need in their area. Our system aims to utilize Twilio to send messages to users on a registered recipients list. Local community members can search different initiatives in their area and appropriately subscribe to receiving notifications from health organizations and initiatives they are interested in. By centralizing these calls for extra aid, Amplify allows residents to identify the what, when, where and how of helping their local communities through the COVID-19 crisis.

Our target populations are primarily those employed and volunteering for covid-19 related local initiatives. We acknowledge that securing public health is not the burden on solely health professionals, so while this population takes on many demographics, and includes those in many industries we believe it is best to use an example for the purposes of this application. Let's take one of our current partners - the Boston Medical Center's volunteering unit led by medical students has been on the call to collect, and organize mask donations from the community for physicians. This web app will function as at tool for the organizers to centralize their calls for donations, while keeping the community updated on their varying needs. The lead volunteer is a vital part of our decision making apparatus and sits and advises us on many meetings. As we scale up we are invested in making community partnerships with many initiatives to tailor our webapp to a diverse set of needs. We intend on working directly with each one of our customers and are continually incorporating feedback as we test out our alpha product, this includes addressing security and marketing concerns. 

Amplify provided tools that support and protect those working to ensure public health including health workers, community organizers and essential services. Any one of these institutions can put out a call for supplies or volunteers from the local community. Community members can then boost the effort of these initiatives. We are creating a framework for robust local healthcare supply chains because we know now that we the national supply chains take time to deliver. When timing can save lives, we hope that Amplify will not only be used reactively during outbreaks but throughout the duration of this pandemic.

Amplify is not the only centralized platform pushing for local communities to donate supplies, however we are the only platform that realized that in the near future pandemic and public health crisis will envelope society more and more frequently. While the urgent needs (face masks, PPE) of our healthcare system correspond to the respiratory nature of a coronavirus, future outbreaks from diseases will require a much more varied set of supplies and volunteer efforts. Amplify provides an online set up for initiatives to ask for anything including extra hands.

Our solution concept takes the form of a web application where hospitals can send mass text messages to indicate need for supplies and residents can sign up to receive alerts or search for hospitals in need in their area. Currently, our system utilizes Twilio to send messages to users on a recipients list. Twilio also can support features like opt-out and bulk texting, which are essential to the full version of this system. By centralizing donation systems for individual hospital needs, Amplify helps residents identify the when, where, what, and how of helping the hospitals in their communities through the COVID-19 crisis.

Given that almost 80% of the total population in North America uses text messages and the SMS open rates are as high as 98% (link), a seemingly effective way to reach the masses is through using SMS. Through using SMS broadcasting, we will be able to send information to many people, but the phrasing of the message will influence whether or not they will donate. Through using mechanisms found in psychological research, we will carefully craft the messages to best encourage participation. As demonstrated by Francesca Gino, in “Sidetracked: Why our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan”, through phrasing our messages and pulling on social bonds, like the actions of neighbors and other community members, we can motivate more people to perform a certain action. This might translate into our messages through using phrasing such as “30% of Boston residents have donated PPE, please consider doing the same!” By segmenting based on hospital location, we can have hospitals craft their messages to their population and target more specifically.

Currently our product is in alpha mode, not yet rolled out. We hope to work with one or two local initiatives in the Boston area including Boston Medical Center. Our solution indirectly serves the larger population by serving those working to mitigate the effects and damage of covid19. We hope to foster partnerships and introduce our solution in at least 5 major cities such as Dallas, Detroit, Boston, Phoenix, etc.. by the end of the year. While we are not quite there yet, we hope to have at least 2 initiatives using amplify in each of these cities. If successful we hope that initiatives in all major cities with large suburban neighboring areas adopt Amplify. Much needs to be fleshed out currently.

Currently we are facing market barriers as adopting Amplify requires buy in from the initiative side and from the local community side. We expect that this will be the biggest barrier to overcome in the coming years. Initiatives will be more likely to use if many community members are signed up and vice versa. We are anticipating on using word of mouth across hospital systems, and social media though we are still working on rolling out Amplify in Boston first. We want to pilot in more cities afterward.Additionally, we hope to be adding many technical features to ensure atomicity and modularity as part of our scaling up process.

We hope to come up with a game plan through our mentorship programs through MIT sandbox and MIT Venture Mentoring Services. As of right now, we intend to take full advantage of our partnership with BMC volunteers. If successful, we want to tap into local media as well as the MIT community to spread the word through official social media accounts. Additionally, we have set up a Twitter account in anticipation. We hope that positive coverage will get our foot in the door amongst other hospitals or university led initiatives. Once well established in Boston we will search for potential initiative partnership in other cities.

8 part time staff

Our current team has seven members who all come from diverse academic trainings, backgrounds and skill sets. We have multiple MIT undergrads, some who are majoring in Course 6 and others who are majoring in biological engineering, a grad student from University of Michigan and a medical student at BostonUniversity. We've been able to really leverage the wide variety of skills to divide different responsibilities,from building the amplify platform to reaching out to hospitals and other volunteer initiatives to researching and navigating any legal issues we may come across. Currently our team is also located in different parts of the US from Boston to Dallas to California, this has allowed us to develop context for different communities and what differences/similarities may exist. We take very strong pride in thededication and passion every member of the team brings.