Leap Orbit Employees Continue to Aid COVID Response
When Leap Orbit closed our offices on March 13, 2020, we expected to be back in two weeks. We never imagined that almost two months later the whole company would still be working from home. Leap Orbit employees have proven incredibly adaptable and are now working from home with very little interruption to our work. AJ Stangl, a Software Engineer with Leap Orbit, has acclimated seamlessly to the change and is as busy as usual.
AJ has been with Leap Orbit for almost two years. During his time with Leap Orbit, AJ has worked on the CRISP Point Solutions Team. CRISP is a regional health information exchange serving Maryland, D.C., and West Virginia and also a Leap Orbit client. AJ ‘s knowledge of FHIR has helped the Point Solutions Team on many projects. His teammates call him the FHIR Marshall. CRISP tasked the Point Solutions Team, to develop a tool that would allow primary care providers to order a COVID-19 test at Maryland's new drive-through testing sites.
Due to the urgent need for the form during the rapidly evolving COVID-19 outbreak, the Point Solutions Team was given a limited amount of time to get the COVID-19 lab order tool up and running for providers to use. AJ and team were given the task on a Thursday with a deadline of the following Tuesday, only a brief period before the launch of the testing sites themselves.
The team was asked to set up a user interface and back end infrastructure so that providers can refer patients without the need for paper to be passed around, as would be the case in typical referrals. Using existing technology and infrastructure developed by Point Solutions and CRISP, AJ and his colleagues helped to create a system that securely generates orders and displays the results. The electronic form auto-populates patient information already available to CRISP, reducing the time to order and minimizing human error. Once complete, the form and information are utilized by a series of other tools developed by Point Solutions and CRISP. Finally, lab results are presented back to providers using a viewer that AJ’s team also developed.
AJ and his teammates developed and launched an entirely new test ordering platform that connects labs, providers and the drive-through testing centers that didn’t even exist a few weeks ago. This process is intuitive for clinicians used to more traditional workflows while reducing the need for in-person contact. AJ says this was one of the more fulfilling projects on which he has worked. "It's a gratifying and humbling feeling to know that you had a hand in developing a tool that you can see in use and which supports the fight against a pandemic."