Brightlynk Encounters

Preparing communities to monitor and alert fast evolving public health emergencies at ultra low cost using community volunteers. 

Frontline community team volunteers enter structured monitoring updates (encounter records) using Instant Messaging (Telegram). All encounters are instantly organised geomapped (Google) for coordinators.

Encounters is useable for many public health use cases.

Team Lead. Dave Johnson

Challenge: Early warning of public health threats

Readiness to quickly respond to rapidly emerging events through frontline organised local community volunteers to quickly collect signficant amounts of specific rich geomarked evidence data 'at the coalface', rapidly moving granular data to where it can be collated and viewed extremely rapidly, and all with extremely low cost budgets.

Underlying Connected Challenges 

collecting data- capturing objective granular raw encountered data on the ground. 

time lag - to see big picture emerging 'back at base' -from frontline encounter to central view to as close to realtime as practical

scaling up - activating many locations, teams, and local communities quickly

Training and support- practical hurdles when onboarding very quickly to respond and scale

Cost budget- remaining fully prepared between large scale public health events.

Mis-communication- can cause errors and delay

Underlying Use Case: 

frontline teams 

Often undocumented manual methods 

central admin and support teams 

Often manually chasing and collating reports from many different teams and sources

Organisation IT 

IT support costs and delays can spiral upwards as they onboard large numbers of people, develop in-house systems, address authentication and security issues, train users, and grow their IT infrastructure to support everything.

Brightlynk Encounters Helps

Any organisation that needs to quickly organise assistance on the ground in multiple locations to monitor and report fast evolving events, with local teams of staff or local community volunteers to provide Encounter reporting quickly and at very low cost. 

Medical 

monitoring for early signs of a medical outbreaks, key data attributes such as  patient age, ethnicity, sex, and reason for encounter record.  Visual corroboration can have attached photo or video. Other non structured symptom information can be entered as free text.  Readings from equipment that is not connected online can be manually entered. Each encounter record is geomarked by the mobile phone location. 

Vulnerable populations

monitoring and encounters or indirect evidence of street homelessness, street substance abuse, mental health, risk of self harm, monitoring activity levels of food banks, homeless shelters, etc. And age, ethnicity, sex. 

Encounters Engagement- Pilot process- Onboard process

Goals for initial broad functional, technical , budgetary goals are set. Use Case discovery, rapid development, trial each feature by real users, feedback and change, pilot familiarisation and onboarding support. After Pilot, Onboard plan to sensibly roll out solution by team, role, region, etc. 

The proposed solution is based on a year of piloting with with our first pilot partner- a national UK organisation called Ascension Trust across 280 areas in the UK.  We worked initially with the leadership team representing 800 volunteers specially trained to provide trauma counselling in support of the national police incident response team in over 100 towns and cities. 

This pilot group is part of a larger group of 14000 volunteers patrolling city centres across the UK in the nighttime economy, helping vulnerable people needing immediate medical and social services care and attention.

Brightlynk Encounters was designed and built as a social enterprise project.  A free public service for the amazing volunteers providing frontline community encounter support for vulnerable populations. 

We see great applicability in the project for using frontline teams working with community volunteers to monitoring medical outbreaks, and much much more in a wide variety of communities. 

Our reason for entering this challenge ideally is to hopefully obtain some funds to help cover the cost of providing Encounters to 14000 community counsellors in 280 UK towns. They do nightly patrols to help vulnerable people needing medical attention from physical attacks, overdoses, alcohol abuse, mental health and suicide risk concerns, homelessness, potential sex trafficking or human trafficking.  They could not afford the commercial costs to build Encounters themselves. So we have been building it and piloting it with them for free  during the quarantine lockdown in the UK for the last year.  We are now at the stage of the pilot where we are working with them now to secure some project funding to rollout and support Brightlynk Encounters across their entire volunteer network. 

Vulnerable Populations

Our pilot partner hopes to release Encounters to 14000 community counsellors in 280 UK towns soon as the lockdowns ease.  These 14000 volunteers do nightly patrols to help vulnerable people needing medical attention from physical attacks, overdoses, alcohol abuse, mental health and suicide risk concerns, homelessness, potential sex trafficking or human trafficking.  Encounters is the quickest, cheapest easy to use way to instantly capture encounter data from the frontline.

Using Encounter Reporting to release Outcome based Funding 

Many funding sponsors are moving to a funding model based entirely on outcomes, not input costs or activity costs. Brightlynk Encounters creates a directly trackable link between encountered issues on the frontline, specific demographic information, support interventions, and outcomes, along with image evidence, location evidence. 

Brightlynk Encounters automatically instantly collates individual Encounter records into reports used to release funding,  speeding up funding payments and increasing the time available for meaningful interactions admin want to have with teams on the frontline.

There is scope for impacting millions of lives. 

Important priority- accelerate payment releases for non-profits

we believe that by producing stakeholder reports in realtime, they can receive outcome base payments more quickly from their stakeholders usually government, police, and other funding sources to encourage faster growth in adoption. We're producing automated reporting now for accelerated funding for our first pilot partner from local government and regional police budgets.

Growing types of encounters 

Our first pilot partner deploys community volunteers to patrol city centres during the nighttime economy days and hours. They have encounters that they report related to immediate medical attention related to injury, assault,substance overdose.

The community volunteers can include other kinds of community monitoring and encounter reporting. We now have additional encounter report including  mental health concern, young people at risk,  and suicide risk. 

We have just added homelessness encounter reporting to their encounter reporting, and discussing with a leading homeless non-profit about making a realtime feed of homeless encounter reporting available to them on geomarked map. 

Growing number of organisations using Brightlynk Encounters

Every single town and city in every country needs at least 1 local community volunteer team providing monitoring for public health concerns, public safety concerns, assistance to vulnerable people. Medium and large cities may need dozens of community volunteer teams.

We're at the pilot stage, and will measure success by onboarding from pilot groups to UK 280 community areas as the lockdown allows us.

Our next milestone is generating funding and growing the number of areas from pilot stage to controlled release stage.  

We will be at 25 areas in the UK by the end of May, and aim to be at 100 areas by the end of 2021. 

This will result in approximately 1,000 first at scene medical assistance encounter records per week. And approximately 500 homeless encounter records per week.

We develop metrics with each organisation that maps to key encounter criteria used in outcome funding reporting, and measurement of team impact by organisation by area region country and patrol. 

External Barriers

Technological

Brightlynk Encounters can be deployed in countries where internet messaging applications are permitted and well established.

User 

Encounters Pilot, we have identified and overcome most user barriers. Instant Messaging has been used for 20 years in most countries. 

There are plenty of community volunteers who are not tech savvy or tech equipped. Some community volunteers who are not technology savvy in the least, and may also not have a reasonable mobile phone that supports instant messaging. Also in some locations, mobile coverage is not possible 100% of the time, so there may be delays in reporting encounter records, as there is today.  

Workaround is that there is a designated local team coordinator goto person who can help and submit encounter records for team members.

 Internal Barriers

We are a pilot project and need funding support to establish a formal organisation and scale and grow. So funding to support and scale the application is the most impending barrier to our being able to move from pilot status to a control release onboarding teams and adding additional interested non-profit groups who wish to begin their own pilots. 

Growing support staff in the UK is not a barrier. 

Self employed. The only pilot currently is with a non-profit in the UK called Ascension Trust, who have trained over 14,000 community volunteers in the UK alone, with branches in the US, and Caribbean. 

During the last year of Covid lockdown in the UK, I have provided technology and communications consulting for non-profit organisations with community volunteers in UK, EMEA, NA,SA, and Asia. I am not formally affiliated with any of them, and not formally working for any of them. 

We need funding to formalise this innovation to help additional non-profits who need this innovation.

We also would like some introductions to other organisations that may need something similar that we can help in a similar way.

Google may have other programmes we can leverage to partner, access to credits to innovate at lower costs, and potentially funds to support the projects beyond and outside the Trinity Challenge. 

But other partner organisations would be very welcome to learn more about what we are doing and why.