64217A public journey planning platform and mobile application for accessing and travelling to Covid-19 test centresClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKOver the next few months many Covid-19 test sites will be set up across the UK. Indeed, there are already many appearing. These sites are being established in a range of locations including park and ride sites, hospitals, universities and at theme parks. It is estimated that hundreds will be created. Many of these sites may be unusual locations for receiving medical attention and may certainly only be accessible by private car. Equally some road operations and access/egress points to these sites will be altered to accommodate the unique situation. In addition, many of these sites may have certain restrictions at certain times for population cohorts or groups. Demand may sometimes be very high resulting in traffic queues and congestion. If these challenges are managed well it will improve the efficiency and resilience of the test sites whilst increasing efficiency and ensuring more people get tested in a timely manner, helping support the UKs recovery. Our vision is to assist through the development of a platform that helps to manage the operation and public access to these test sites by providing tools to plan the right journeys, at the right times based on the best information and data collected and provided by the test site operational teams. At its simplest the platform will consist of a multimodal journey planning app, a system to create and a manage testing site data and information on the journey planning app and an API to provide test site data to third parties. Our Platform, delivered as a mobile application, will provide the user with the ability to confidently plan a journey to test sites. It will also provide information about each site, the eligibility of test recipients at each location, specific information about each site, help manage demand, allow users to subscribe to receive real-time updates regarding the status of their local test site, provide parking and other transport related information. It can also be used to provide levels of busyness at test sites helping to smooth the demand curve. UPDATED 29th September 2020: The project, the milestones and deliverables detailed above have been completed on time and under budget. An extension of the work is proposed, that will move the product to a trial phase and use unspent funds to conduct a live assessment of the app at a Covid-19 test centre. To achieve this, we will investigate the structure of existing testing regimes to best understand the relationships between management contractors, test centre management and the best business model for provision of the application to operators. As part of this process we hope to identify a small number of test centres and management organisations interested in participating in a trial, who we will work with to confirm the scope of such a trial. We will document the scope of the trial outlining and where and how findings will be captured and used to inform further refinement and/or update of the platform. This will culminate in the Trial Methodology outlining activities and steps to be followed by test centres and users to enable the trial to take place without introducing excessive administrative effort by stakeholders. We anticipate running the trial for a two-week period (weekdays and weekends). The trial will be monitored throughout. Outcomes and findings will be captured in a technical report. The report will also identify if the app could be repurposed for later activities during the Covid-19 management and recovery phases such as vaccination programs and antibody testing programs.