Conotify.org

Currently, without treatment or vaccines, the essential problem to be solved is the transmission of the Covid19 from one individual to another.

Many GPS or bluetooth tracking technologies have been developed worldwide but they pose significant ethical problems and technological challenges. This is why we wanted to limit the spread of the virus without tracking technologies. Thus, we created the website Conotify.org which allows us to digitize the process of investigation of contact cases (which is carried out manually by medical investigators) and to democratize it, by allowing every person tested positive or having symptoms of Covid19 to use it. 

The method of contact case investigation carried out manually by medical investigators has proven to be very efficient, but also very costly in human resources and not fast enough. Our solution could then have a significant positive impact worldwide by alleviating the lack of medical investigators to carry it out.

The challenge being addressed is the massive spread of the virus. The current problem encountered in the manual contact tracing method is its cost in human resources, despite its effectiveness. This cost poses a problem of scalability when the pandemic infections number rises to a critical level. The Manuel contact tracing method also implies inequality between countries: in Wuhan, 9,000 contact tracing investigators have been mobilized. Not all countries have the financial and the operational resources to deploy such a strategy. 

In this sense, it was important for us to use innovation to avoid the saturation of manual contact tracing services and make it available to all countries.

Another problem with the so-called contact tracing method via a smartphone tracing application is also the exclusion of part of the population. For example, in France only 70% of French people own a smartphone. This excludes both vulnerable people, thus creating social inequality, and the most vulnerable elderly people. 

It is for this risk of exclusion that we have turned to the digitisation of this manual process, which makes it possible to compensate for the lack of scalability of manual systems and can thus provide an effective response at the global level.

Our website Conotify.org (which is BriserLaChaine.org in France) relies mainly on memo-technical means and secure API integrations. 

The user first answers a few questions to assess a possible contamination, if he has not already been medically diagnosed or tested. Following this, a period of contagiousness is estimated according to the onset of symptoms and will allow the user to proactively identify cross-infected individuals. Thus, the site proposes to guide the user step by step in the construction of his list of "case contacts". Typical questions, memo-technical tips and optional and secure integrations with certain applications (such as the diary or telephone call history) support this approach. 

Conotify.org will then synthesize a personalized message for the user in order to warn people he could have contaminated. The choice is also given to the user to use an anonymous sending service. Notified persons then receive the message containing personalized health instructions accompanied by a link to the web-application in order to be able to monitor the appearance of symptoms and, if necessary, warn a doctor. They will then be able to follow the procedure themselves on Conotify.org.  

Conotify.org is primarily for anyone who has been diagnosed with Covid19 or is experiencing symptoms. But its impact extends beyond the target population as it protects the entourage and the people encountered during the contagious period and who themselves will be able to protect their loved ones by visiting the site. 

The target population, i.e. the people diagnosed positive or feeling symptoms, fully participate in the elaboration of the solution since the search for potential contact cases is essentially based on the user's memory with the help of the memo-technical means provided by Conotify.org These memory aids, added to the possible synchronization of other applications such as the calendar, allow the user to retrace what he was able to do during his contagious period and to refresh his memory which he needs to warn his loved ones.

In order to prevent future epidemics and in anticipation of mass vaccinations and treatments, technological innovation plays a fundamental role. That's why we wanted to meet this need with our solution that avoids the problem of saturation of manual contact tracing services essential in epidemic prevention and rapid response. Our Conotify.org solution allows you to slow down as well as track the spread of an epidemic both now and in the future. Finally, our problem, our target population and our solution are more than ever related to the challenge.

Conotify.org is a contact tracing solution that digitizes the very efficient manual process done by the investigating doctors. In the field of digitized contact tracing we mainly find applications that operate with GPS or Bluetooth tracking technologies. However, our website differs from these applications in many aspects: we do not use a Bluetooth tracking solution and rely only on the memory of our users. This obviously implies that Conotify.org does not prevent infections between strangers but it also has many advantages. For Conotify.org to work, it does not require that 60% of the population install an application but that infected people (and who are symptomatic) make the journey to the website (so less than 60% of the population).

Since our solution is a website, the device can also be used with someone to assist, especially if you have more difficulty or don't have a smartphone. In this sense, our solution does create a new dimension of performance and is therefore innovative.

Conotify.org reproduces the sanitary brigades’s process to trace the contacts that a Covid+ person might have contaminated. Doing so, it empowers all Covid+ persons to follow this process on their own, and therefore scale it beyond the capacity of the brigades. 

The core of Conotify.org technology is a very strong and intuitive UX and UI, which gives the users the information and the tools needed to identify and notify their contacts. The  user first answers questions to assess her Covid status, and gets informed of her estimated period of contagiousness. The site then guides the user step by step in the identification of her "contact cases", with memo-technical tips and optional and secure integrations with certain applications (such as calendar or phone call history). To ease the notification, Conotify.org embeds an option to send automated messages to the identified contacts. Notified persons then receive the message with health recommendations and a link to the site, where they can monitor the appearance of symptoms. They will then be able to identify and notify their own contact cases on Conotify.org

The "low tech" side of our solution is its strength: a simple and intuitive user experience that quickly encourages and helps people to make their own contact tracing. The product is easy to understand, which increases the confidence of citizens in the solution and its acceptability. The low tech aspect also makes the solution highly replicable and non dependent on a country's overall tech infrastructure.

Our technology was launched recently and initial results show that the ambition to leverage intuitive UX/UI to empower people to identify and notify their contacts cases is achievable. Over 100 individuals have alerted their contacts through Conotify.org’s embedded notification tools. Over 1000 have taken the journey to learn about their contagiousness period, and identify the persons they might have contaminated, which they have decided to alert by their own communication means. All this with very little communication and in a post lockdown when the epidemics is quickly receding.

Moreover, we have been able to strike an important partnership with another solution, https://maladiecoronavirus.fr/, which help individuals assess their covid status, and nowch refers all potentially infected people to our site. Users who come to Conotify.org through this referral are more qualified users, and have a much higher conversion rate, meaning probability to complete the user journey on Conotify.org and alert their contacts. This is a strong signal that partnering with public health institutions can greatly expand the impact of our solution.

As for the theory of change, two long-term outcomes were targeted: the sanitary impact of Conotify.org and its impact on privacy. 

Therefore, three main questions guided our reflection: what is the impact of the website, how can it be maximized and how can Conotify.org be compared to other contact tracing strategies. An epidemiologic model that simulates a user’s behaviour was made in order to answer them.

It concluded that the main activities of the website is to help users list their contact cases and notify them by themselves at any time while collecting no personal data. Links on the associated outputs are the following hypotheses: appropriate distribution, conversion rate and actionability. Bayes Impact has already confirmed that governmental partnerships can consistently raise these hypotheses. Indeed its partnership with the official website maladiecoronavirus.fr multiplied the conversion rate by more than five and brought more than 1,000 new visitors for a month. Moreover, the new shortly-released version of Conotify.org will also help to attain high actionability rates.

Conotify.org’s privacy-respectful activity of self-notification and sensibilization to respect health precautions therefore leads to several outputs. First the website is an immediate contact tracing tool as it can save up to two days compared to standard contact tracing policies. It also is a scalable contact tracing digital tool that can be easily launched and used even when the number of infected cases is skyrocketing, without necessitating more workforce. Finally, its recommendation helps sensibilizing the population to health precautions and self-made contact tracing and does not lead to personal data storage or gathering by an external entity. 

All these confirm that Conotify.org is a self-notifying website effectively complementing institutional contact tracing strategies, independently of the status of the epidemic and while respecting the privacy of its users. These outcomes are especially beneficial if no health brigade is in place or if they are overwhelmed at the outbreak of the epidemic.

As the impact was only modelled for now, more concrete measurements would allow us to control the validity of the logical links.

Our solution was launched recently, and we continue iterating with users to improve it. Our first use cases are promising:over 100 people have alerted their contacts cases through Conotify.org, in just 3 weeks, and despite the massive drop in the number of new Covid cases in France. 

To this we should add over 1000 users who have gone through the Conotify.org journey and were sensitized to the need to notify their contacts, and who chose to send notifications through their own means. This shows the educational impact of Conotify.org, and is a positive metric of indirect impact.

Based on these initial results, we have modelized Conotify.org’s impact to understand under which  conditions it could be maximised. Our model shows that the biggest factors are distribution (ability to reach a maximum of Covid+ persons in a given country), and credibility/actionability of the notification that notified contacts receive.

These factors can be maximised through institutional partnerships with health institutions, which we are developing.With such partnerships, we estimate Conotify.org can serve 20% of Covid+ cases in a given country. This year we aim to deploy in 2 countries beyond France (Brasil and India), which would mean 400K people served according to current trends. Within 5 years we aim to be deployed in  a maximum of countries as a ready-to-use solution in case of pandemic, able to serve millions of users (projecting on the current crisis, Conotify.org would have served at least 2M users).

Conotify.org is both useful for countries that have passed the first contamination wave, to prevent a potential second wave, and for countries that are still struggling with the first wave of contamination but don’t apply full lockdown policies, and where there exists not sanitary brigades to conduct the contact tracing, and where the contagion rate is such that these brigades are overwhelmed. Our first goal is to integrate Conotify.org in health public policy tools for both of these types of countries, with an urgent need and effort regarding countries enduring the first coronavirus wave (in Latin America for example). 

For the next five years, we want to develop Conotify.org as well as possible so that it can be useful to future epidemics of the Covid-19 type, be they on regional or global scale. We aim to deploy Conotify.org in countries that need a solution that is easy to deploy and inexpensive, to increase their level of preparedness to future pandemics. We aim to offer Conotify.org can as one of the official contact tracing processes, in the toolbox needed to fight pandemics, alongside with testing, etc.. Deploying Conotify.org will help countries implement contact tracing from the very first signs of a health crisis. Systematic testing and contact tracing can allow to contain an epidemics, and to avoid having to implement lockdowns, and their very adverse consequences on vulnerable populations.

With the launch of our website, we found that the effectiveness of our solution is highly dependent on distribution (reaching covid+ persons), and credibility (the fact that the website appears to be trustworthy and therefore that the notifications received have an impact on the behavior of the notified person). More precisely, the impact of Conotify.org does not rely on the virality of the platform, but rather on its ability to target and reach covid+ persons. In this context, one of the major obstacles that can prevent us from reaching our objectives would be a problem in distribution, if we failed to reach, and be used by the persons who are Covid+. The impact of our solution would be higher through partnership with public health institutions which would enhance both distribution and credibility. 

As our platform does not use personal data, we do not anticipate major legal barriers. One market barrier could be that our UX/UI and the process of contact tracing embedded in Conotify.org does not easily replicate to different health/pandemics and cultural contexts. We think this risk is limited as we have modeled this process on practices already widely and long used by the WHO in different countries for various pandemics. Lastly, our impact could be limited by a scarcity of resources and time to be invested in developing partnerships with public health institutions abroad.

At the product distribution level, the barrier can be overcome by partnering with public health institutions. For example, a B2G model in collaboration with government or state institutions would allow us to be used as one of the official contact tracing processes to have a much more significant impact. Other forms of partnerships for distribution are possible if we encounter difficulties with governments, such as collaborations with private actors such as Nonprofits or doctors organizations, hospitals and other health organizations. 

In this sense, we will choose countries to focus on according to the feasibility of these collaborations and the state of the pandemics, to ensure we can maximize our impact and remain focused in the use of our resources. In addition, our Nonprofit is used to working with public services, as this is the model we have used over the last four years for several of our technologies, in different fields.

The replicability of our tool to different pandemics context is ensured by the fact that it was created in collaboration with a scientific committee composed of doctors, who have guided the development to make the tool widely relevant to all type of pandemics situations.

In financial terms, maintaining the solution is inexpensive and can be covered by revenue generated through our partnerships with public institutions. Partnership development can be initiated through grant and then sustained through independent revenue generated by the partnerships.

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Our team works around three main functions for the project: product design, development and partnership.

Three FTE are currently working on the product development:

• 1 tech lead 

• 2 full-stack software engineers

Two FTE are currently working on the product design:

• A UX designer 

• A product manager 

Then, two PTE are currently working on developing institutional partnerships: 

• A partnership manager  

• The CEO of Bayes Impact

Total : Five FTE and two PTE work on our solution team.

We rely on a committed and complementary team coming from both the tech and the social impact sectors, gathering:

• Expertise in stakeholder management, and ability to create strong partnerships

• Skilled engineers and developers, led by our CTO, a former Google engineer who won several competitions.

• Experience in social innovation which has allowed us to rapidly acquire skills to create a human-centered solution.

Above all, we have strived to develop an ambitious vision of what we believe is the future of public services, which has allowed us to continuously attract dedicated talents and strong support from our partners.

For our solution, we are currently a partner of the official website https://maladiecoronavirus.fr which allows people experiencing symptoms or who think they may have been exposed to Covid19 to take the free and anonymous online test to monitor their symptoms, take the test or assess their deconfinement. Depending on the results, users can then go to our website Conotify.org in order to protect their loved ones. The partnership with https://maladiecoronavirus.fr is completely free and is simply the result of an obvious complementarity between our two respective products to help people potentially affected. 

Secondly, we also have a board with a scientific committee composed of doctors and emergency physicians so that the decisions made for our product best meet the needs of health organizations.

Finally, we are currently working on a partnership with the French authorities and various health organizations to integrate our solution into the process of digitizing health services.

As a technology non-profit, Bayes Impact’s model relies on two pillars:

• Philanthropy funds our R&D. This allows us to ensure that our technological choices and product development are only driven by the common good and the impact we aim to have for our beneficiaries. This also allows us to put all our technologies in open-source, so that it can benefit, and be improved by, the broader ecosystem.

• Once a technology has a proven impact, we ensure the scalability and sustainability of this impact through paid-partnerships with public services, and general interest driven organisations. Through these partnerships, we tailor our technologies to the specific needs of these organisations and their beneficiaries, and ensure their continuous improvement and adaptation to the evolution of these needs, through SLA type of contracting. For example, we have developed an AI-based coaching platform for jobseekers, whose impact has been proven by over 250,000 use cases in France. We are now deploying this platform within the processes of public employment services which are interested in making it available to their job seekers. Doing so, we do not rely on philanthropy to sustain our impact over the long term. 

We will replicate this model with Conotify.org. The generic version of the technology is available and open source, and we will partner with public institutions to adapt it to the local contexts, and possibly enrich it with additional functionalities according to their needs. This will generate the revenues needed to sustain Conotify.org’s impact.

As a low-tech, easy-to-deploy technology, Conotify.org does not require a high level of investment to achieve impact and be maintained. The main areas of costs will be the development of partnerships with health institutions to promote the distribution and use of our platform in case of pandemics, and the development costs associated with the adaptation of the platform to the specific context of the countries in which we operate / of the pandemics we tackle. 

These costs will be covered by entering into contracts with the public institutions we will partner with. In particular, the non-recurring development costs to adapt the platform will be covered through one-off, paid development services. This will also cover partnership development costs. The recurring costs to maintain, update, and enrich the platform with additional services (if required by the partner) will be covered through service-level agreements with our partners. This will also allow to recoup and amortize the initial R&D investments, which we have made on our own resources.

In this context, any philanthropic funding will be used to accelerate the partnership development, to fund our growth, and ensure that our solution is deployed in as many countries as possible to have an impact on the current Covid-19 crisis, and increase the preparedness of these countries for a the next pandemics of this type.

We have chosen to apply to Solve because this challenge can help us with the two major obstacles we may encounter in the international development of our product. Initially, Solve would allow us to allocate a certain amount of time to the deployment of Conotify.org worldwide to increase its impact, as well as to allocate time to developing B2G partnerships using the funds received, in order to initiate the sustainable model we have described. As a Nonprofit, private philanthropy is essential in the development of our projects.

We also believe, Conotify.org would greatly benefit from entering in relation with the ecosystem of Solvers. As an opensource platform, its impact can be vastly increased by integrating and partnering with other solutions with address adjacent problems. 

Lastly, the mentorship that Solve can provide will be key in accelerating the scaling of our impact. We believe being part of the global Solver community will enhance the internationalization of Conotify.org, and be a strong signal of the credibility and ambition of our solution for potential partners.

We noticed that the impact of Conotify.org was correlated to its distribution and possible partnerships, ensuring that it complemented the various measures to fight the epidemic, such as numerous tests for example. For this we need support for partnerships with large institutions that will then be able to ensure a good distribution of Conotify.org. Finally, once these partnerships have been established, it seems essential to us to measure the precise impact that the distribution has had through evaluations to finally see how our website participates in the overall strategy of the fight against the epidemic and how we can play on the different levers to increase our impact, both in the short term and in the long term for future epidemics.

We would like to partner with organizations such as hospitals or the Ministry of Health to ensure that our solution is widely integrated and used in the contact case research process performed by physician-investigators. But we also seek to develop partnerships with private actors such as NGOs or screening and analysis centres. We are, for example, currently in discussion with the NGO "La Croix Rouge" or the ARS (Regional Health Agency) and the Center for disease control with whom we wish to collaborate. Discussions at various stages of progress are possible thanks to our board with a scientific committee composed of doctors in particular.