All eyes are on the relaunched Project StepOne as the government is set to tackle the evolving Omicron variant. The organisation is making arrangements and alerting volunteers to be on standby.

It isn’t the first time as Project StepOne utilised tech solutions and cloud power to fill in the gaps in the Indian health infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic back in March 2020.

Project StepOne was started by a few tech enthusiasts who want to bring a change in the health space and help people during the pandemic using technology.

Project StepOne handles helplines across 21 states and union territories.

“We basically work to provide Covid-19 consulting or telemedicine facility on the existing state government helplines,” said Raghavendra Prasad T S in a statement.

“We have already boosted our internal infrastructure to scale faster and more smoothly if there were to be another big wave,” he further added.

The organization received around 30,000 calls on the first day itself. Also, StepOne is said to be the extension of the government scheme while members from StepOne run a COVID-19 helpline in Delhi.

“We worked with the government where we would, on a real-time basis, get the list of people who were positive. We would proactively call them, introduce ourselves, as you know, calling on behalf of the government and based on their symptoms and home conditions give them medical advice as well as advice on whether they should continue at home or if they go to a hospital or a Covid-care centre,” Prasad stated.

Establishing this kind of volunteer effort in India needs huge resources, where the average calls are crossing the 300,000 mark during the second wave in April-May 2021.

So, they need the most efficient and reliable tech solutions. That’s where Amazon Web Services (AWS) came into play and proved to be a game-changer.

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Also, they utilised other services like Amazon QuickSight to understand the data better and get a better view of it.

“We had to build specific processes around our technology that manages the workflow because there’s a large number of people. Most of it was built in-house, but we also had technology that we sourced from outside existing open source technology, and all of that was hosted on AWS,” said Prasad.

“Initially we were doing all of that manually and we knew that was not scalable. So we requested AWS to help out and they assigned a few solution architects. Plus we also had a stellar team of architects from various startups, who have experience building extremely scalable solutions that work for millions of users,” he further stated.

Nonetheless, the biggest threat isn’t getting the tech onboard, but finding medical students and doctors to volunteer.

Project StepOne includes a huge volunteer force of 15,000 medical students, 10,000 doctors, and around 5,000 non-medical corporates.