KelvinCAREsm Application Monitors Health of Alaska’s Offshore Workforce, Protects Vital Fishing Industry

BOSTON, Feb. 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — A commercial fishing boat far offshore from Alaska would seem to be a safe place to avoid the pandemic. But with crews cycling in and out on a regular basis, the danger is actually quite high. A single, asymptomatic, Covid-19-positive worker in the tight quarters of a fishing vessel could quickly infect the entire crew and spell disaster for the commercial operation. So how can businesses and workers be sure — or at least confident — that the coronavirus isn’t being carried to their remote workplaces? In Alaska, there’s an app for that.

Alaska Maritime Physicians is on the front line of providing healthcare to the workers in Alaska’s offshore industries. Since 2015, it has been the vital link for urgent and emergent telemedicine for remote crews — essentially, their 911. But the pandemic requires a whole new paradigm of preventive care and testing to keep workers safe, and only a real-time digital solution can rise to the task.

Two brothers, James Lord, M.D. and R. Scott Lord, MBA, are the co-founders of Alaska Maritime Physicians. As they saw the pandemic picking up steam, they conceived an application that could track and report test results, monitor worker health, give employers real-time perspective on their workforce health, and trigger fast responses when a worker shows symptoms — all geared toward the goal of preventing catastrophic outbreaks on offshore vessels and remote facilities. That application is KelvinCARE. Their team of medical and technical professionals used their deep knowledge and experience to create Dynamic Observation Protocols™, the clinical backbone built into KelvinCARE’s software engine.

“When Covid-19 kicked off in March, we knew it was going to be a big deal,” Scott Lord said. “I knew we needed to prepare and get ready to support our maritime customers, to help protect the fishing fleet and all the mariners at sea. Our first thought was, how can we be of service to our companies and our mariners and take good care of them and keep their businesses productive? So we had this idea for KelvinCARE.”

An app idea in search of an enterprise-grade platform

The pandemic was moving fast. Alaska Maritime Physicians had to move faster to prevent disastrous spread in confined offshore workplaces. Lord tried two different development platforms which, while fine for hurriedly putting together an app, ended up being too “minor league,” in his words, to take KelvinCARE to market. He needed an enterprise-grade platform.

The Mendix low-code platform fit the bill. They could build the app quickly  — in  a matter of weeks. Elastic cloud deployment meant it could scale on the fly as it processed more and more individuals. And the app was backed by a team that could help Lord make sure it kept meeting the need in rapidly unfolding circumstances.

“A pandemic is a fast-paced and unpredictable environment to work in,” Lord said. “Volumes were changing on us dynamically as customers added employees, and then we had to handle a crush of incoming critical infrastructure workers and visitors for the State of Alaska. And at the same time, the requirements, features, and functions for the application were changing and continue to change with the situation on the ground and on the water.”

The Mendix platform, along with an engagement of Mendix Premier Support and Expert Services, gave Alaska Maritime Physicians the agility, flexibility, reliability, and rapid response capability it needed to stay ahead of a dynamic and unpredictable situation. KelvinCARE proved it could meet the challenge.

A state-wide solution to protect critical workers, industries and infrastructure

Alaska fisheries generate well over $5 billion in economic activity annually and directly employ nearly 60,000 people and, indirectly, another 10,000. The oil industry accounts for about one-quarter of Alaska’s jobs and has pumped billions into Alaska’s coffers and to its residents. These industries, critical to the people and economy of Alaska, are the industries KelvinCARE is protecting, by protecting travelers, individual businesses and their workforces.

Over the summer, KelvinCARE attracted the attention of the State of Alaska, and it employed the app for a project that ultimately screened 150,000 workers and visitors entering Alaska through the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

“We’re proud to be part of the team that’s helping protect the economy and protect the communities of Alaska,” Lord said. “It’s really about being of service. That’s our goal.”

Mendix CEO Derek Roos says: “These unprecedented times have really proven the value of low-code in general and Mendix in particular. When fast action is required to address large-scale needs, Mendix comes through with unmatched collaborative capabilities — supporting all hands on deck to deal with a problem head-on — plus a cloud-first architecture, true native mobile, one-click deployment. The list goes on. From the City of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, to the City of San Antonio, Texas, to the offshore industries of Alaska, we’re proud that our technology is playing a key role and making a difference in the fight against the coronavirus.”

Click here to access content free of charge from Mendix World, the world’s largest virtual low-code conference, featuring more than 60 sessions, including more than 20 by customers, and covering the gamut of low-code application development topics from strategy to practical, hands-on platform training.

Background

In a pandemic-disrupted world, software is the new lifeblood of our daily lives and the connective tissue holding together the global economy. However, traditional software development takes far too long and very often fails to deliver the results business needs and users love. Even prior to COVID-19 there were simply not enough professional software developers in the world to build all the software currently required. The global pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated what was already a software and business crisis. Enter low-code software development. Low-code from Mendix is a powerful enterprise-grade visual development approach empowering citizen and professional developers to make cloud-native applications more than 10X faster for web and mobile using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic – all through an intuitive graphical user interface.

For more information about KelvinCARE’s Workforce Continuity Solutions please visit https://Kelvin.CARE.

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About Mendix

Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code, is fundamentally reinventing the way applications are built in the digital enterprise. With the Mendix platform, enterprises can ‘Make with More,’ by broadening an enterprise’s development capability to conquer the software development bottleneck; ‘Make it Smart,’ by making apps with rich native experiences that are intelligent, proactive, and contextual; and ‘Make at Scale,’ to modernize core systems and build large app portfolios to keep pace with business growth. The Mendix platform is built to promote intense collaboration between business and IT teams and dramatically accelerate application development cycles, while maintaining the highest standards of security, quality, and governance — in short, to help enterprises confidently leap into their digital futures. Mendix’s ‘Go Make It’ platform has been adopted by more than 4,000 leading companies around the world.

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Dan Berkowitz
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