CASE STUDY
Consumer testing services
Conceiving and scaling a consumer focused public health enterprise for covid testing and vaccinations
During the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations that wanted to offer routine and frequently repeated Covid testing for people without symptoms (“Assurance Testing”) had difficulty getting access to cost-effective, high-scale labs that can process tests efficiently. Universities, schools, nursing homes, small employers and others also found the logistics and contracting too complicated to manage. Meanwhile, testing companies, university labs, and hospitals that could add much needed capacity to the system were finding it too cumbersome to contract and set up billing arrangements with all the organizations needing tests and to establish local testing sites. Without guaranteed volume they were not able to optimize investments in increasing capacity and driving innovation.
Conceiving a marketplace to bridge the gap
CIC, while not a healthcare company, excelled in logistics management, sales, customer service, revenue management, and innovation. Recon helped establish an alliance with CIC Health and Ariadne Labs and including a 50-state clinical network (PWNHealth), software capabilities (ixLayer and others), K-12 schools and colleges who had a pressing need to start testing for the fall semester, ambulance companies to provide clinical staffing, and a first lab, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which had pioneered high-throughput Covid testing. CIC Health quarterbacking the alliance launched a testing marketplace and enabled testing collection sites. This team was then mobilized to help set up mass vaccination sites.
From new entrant to national leader in 6 months
CIC Health, a newly formed subsidiary of CIC became a national leader in both testing and vaccinations. In testing it broke through scale barriers and brought affordable testing to the masses through distributed sites including several open to the public. It helped reopen public schools in Massachusetts by pioneering pooled testing in what became a model for other states and for the Federal program. In vaccinations it enabled scale by establishing mass vaccination sites at Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park, Reggie Lewis track, and the Hynes Convention Center delivering over half a million vaccinations. In the process CIC the parent company was able to weather the severe downturn in their core business in commercial real estate and retain its team for an economic recovery post pandemic by redeploying its people during the pandemic.
SECTOR
Medtech and Diagnostics