How Atlas Genomics Supported the Tahoma School District’s COVID-19 Testing Program and How Other Clinical Laboratories Can Follow Suit

‍Editor’s Note: This case study - originally published on July 27, 2022 - highlights how the Atlas Genomics partnership with LigoLab and the TestDirectly Direct-to-Consumer Lab Testing Portal helped the Tahoma School District quickly implement a comprehensive and school-friendly COVID-19 testing program.

The Lasting Impact of COVID-19 on Education: From Global Pandemic to Learning Loss

March 11, 2020, marked the beginning of an era that will remain imprinted on the world’s psyche for generations. That was the day the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. Shortly afterward, people from all nations and walks of life witnessed the destructive toll that tiny, fast-spreading viruses like SARS-CoV-2 can have on public health and the global economy. Millions of lives were lost globally, and countless businesses were shuttered. 

For educators in the United States, the pandemic prompted nationwide school closures and a sudden transition to virtual learning for all K-12 schools. By the fall of 2020, some schools were able to offer in-person or “hybrid” learning opportunities. However, facing the Delta variant of the virus in late 2020 and early 2021, education experts feared that learning loss would become a growing issue if K-12 students continued to learn remotely. 

A May 2020 study published by Brown University put weight behind these fears as it hypothesized that virtual learners would likely return to school in the fall of 2020 with “63-68 percent of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year, and 37-50 percent of the learning gains in math.” 

Making the Case for School Screening and Diagnostic Testing

U.S. educators were eager to find a way forward in the safest and least disruptive way possible. For public health officials, diagnostic laboratories like Seattle-based Atlas Genomics would play a key role. 

In early 2021, the high-complexity molecular diagnostics laboratory was called on by the Washington State Department of Health and school districts within the state of Washington to administer COVID-19 screening and diagnostic testing as part of the Learn to Return program, which included over 500 school partners throughout the state that teamed up with the DOH to implement school-based COVID testing to maximize in-person learning. 

Public health and government officials recognized that widespread COVID-19 testing would be essential to safely returning students to the classroom. They also understood the importance of partnering with reliable laboratories that had a proven track record of success.

That’s where Atlas Genomics came in. In the spring of 2021, the lab launched a pilot school testing program in partnership with a district comprising 30 schools and roughly 25,000 students. 

The program focused on pooled COVID-19 testing, a method that combines up to 25 individual swabs into a single specimen tube. Once collected, the pooled samples were sent to the lab for analysis, with results automatically reported to all relevant stakeholders, ensuring efficiency, speed, and transparency.

The pilot program helped set the stage for the lab’s later work with other Washington schools, including the Tahoma School District. 

The Tahoma School District and Atlas Genomics Partnership 

The Washington State DOH conducted a rigorous vetting process to select COVID-19 testing vendors to support the Learn to Return initiative before the voluntary testing program went into action. The program called for schools to use a modified quarantine for unvaccinated students who were identified as being in “close contact” with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19. Students with consent for COVID-19 testing were then allowed to remain in school if they tested negative twice within a set protocol. 

Thanks to the success of its pilot program, Atlas Genomics became a vendor of choice for the Learn to Return initiative, offering local in-state testing solutions and support for school districts to partner with for the new school year. 

Tahoma School District, located in Maple Valley, Washington, and serving approximately 8,600 students from preschool through 12th grade, needed such a partner to halt a growing crisis as a new variant ignited a third outbreak of COVID-19 in the fall of 2021.  

“By the end of summer, it looked like the pandemic was subsiding and that we were in for an easy transition back to in-person learning,” recalled Tahoma School District’s COVID Supervisor Kyle Hood. “But then the new variant hit, and things progressed quickly. That’s when state and local health jurisdictions started rolling out school screening measures.”

How the School Screening and Diagnostic Testing Program Worked

Screening and diagnostic testing are public health measures that help officials identify infectious diseases by testing a designated population at a specific time and place. For the Tahoma School District, this method enabled its educators to get a daily snapshot of the entire student population and quickly act to prevent potential virus outbreaks. 

“Our screening and diagnostic testing program provided free COVID-19 tests at school sites to students whose parent or guardian opted them into the program by submitting consent,” said Hood. “Routine testing provided the community with an accurate representation of the prevalence of COVID-19 and helped our schools remain open and safe.”

The program was designed with privacy and parental choice in mind. Parents and guardians had the option to consent to their child’s participation in testing, and all individual identities were kept strictly confidential. Only the school district maintained administrative records of positive test results and their timing. 

For unvaccinated individuals identified as close contacts, the protocol offered two options: a 10-day quarantine or participation in a "test-to-stay" program, which allowed them to continue attending class as long as they consistently tested negative.

Effective Testing That Preserved Thousands of Classroom Hours

“If students who came into close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 didn’t have symptoms and remained negative, they didn’t have to quarantine,” added Hood, who noted that the program saved thousands of educational hours that may have otherwise been lost. “The students were allowed to stay on campus as long as they tested negative two times within seven days.”

Hood also explained that students who previously had COVID-19 or were vaccinated and asymptomatic were not required to quarantine after close contact with the virus.

‍TestDirectly Made Testing at Scale a Reality

One of the most pressing challenges for the Tahoma School District was managing the rapid and widespread transmission of the new COVID-19 variant throughout the community.

“In December of 2021, we had 356 positive cases in our district, including staff and students,” said the district COVID Coordinator Mikki Roessler. “By January 2022, we were up to 981 positive cases, with roughly 2,200 close contacts.”

To help manage this volume, Atlas and Tahoma teamed up with TestDirectly (TestDirectly.com), an effective tool for direct-to-consumer lab testing, to streamline its collection, testing, and reporting processes. 

Through the TestDirectly partnership, the advantages of the molecular lab testing software became clear early on. The lab consistently processed and reported an average of 1,000 specimen samples each week, with results delivered within 24 hours. This turnaround time, measured from the moment a specimen arrived at the lab to when results were shared with stakeholders, demonstrated both the speed and efficiency of the TestDirectly platform.

TestDirectly Case Study: How Avero Diagnostics Embraced Laboratory Information System Innovation and Won a Statewide Testing Contract

TestDirectly is a vendor-neutral direct-to-consumer lab testing web portal developed by LigoLab for specialty testing services like the Learn to Return program. The portal effectively creates patient-facing direct-to-consumer labs. 

TestDirectly is a pathology software that eliminates the potential for errors and the accessioning bottleneck while removing other clinical lab workflow barriers that would otherwise prevent a lab like Atlas from scaling its operations to serve its community. 

The innovative direct-to-consumer lab testing portal integrates with all LIS laboratory information system software, with training, implementation, and go-live all accomplished in as little as two weeks. 

To date, laboratories and collection centers throughout the U.S. have leveraged the power behind TestDirectly and TestDirectly.com to efficiently collect, process, and report millions of COVID-19 cases while supporting various school/university, employer, and organizational testing programs.

Discover More: Highlighting the Versatility of the TestDirectly Direct-to-Consumer Lab Testing Portal

The Power of Molecular Lab Software Partnership 

The Atlas Genomics molecular lab software partnership with TestDirectly dates back to the fall of 2020. According to Casey Marvin, the lab’s Program Manager for Washington State Schools, the partnership has been a great fit for the lab and its clients.

“We’ve been able to dramatically increase the productivity of all our school testing programs with TestDirectly,” said Marvin, whose school customers numbered in the hundreds for the 2021-2022 school year. “The number of specimens we can handle, and our turnaround times, have contributed to keeping Washington students safe and in school.”

Marvin said he continues to receive positive feedback from school administrators enrolled in the school testing program, especially for onboarding and efficiency. He also said the support team behind the TestDirectly direct-to-consumer lab testing solution is second to none.

“The team at TestDirectly provided phenomenal customer service and training,” added Marvin. “They were extremely responsive, especially during the Omicron surge.”

For Marvin, the partnership was built on communication and follow-through. 

“When something needed to happen, it happened quickly and positively,” he said. 

Parent and Guardian Buy-In Ultimately Made the Program a Success

There was another benefit that came from getting students back into a safe and productive learning environment: parents, for the first time in a long time, didn’t have to worry as much about disruptions and their work schedules as a result of an impromptu school closure. 

“Once they became familiar with the Learn to Return program, the district’s parents and guardians responded positively,” said Marvin. “We knew that for this to work, we needed to provide personal care. The community was scared. We knew we needed to do everything to reassure them that this partnership would keep their kids safe at school.”

Marvin said that once the adults learned how easy it was to use TestDirectly and opt into the program, they quickly adopted it. 

At the onset of the Omicron outbreak, the Tahoma School District established a dedicated COVID-19 Response Team, along with a phone line and email address, to provide parents with a direct channel for questions, concerns, and support.

TestDirectly was the engine that helped parents schedule test appointment times, and it efficiently tied Atlas Genomics with the district’s COVID Response Team for test processing and consumer lab reports. The district team reported results to parents/guardians soon after they were available. 

Organizational Safety Made Easy with Direct-to-Consumer Lab Testing

TestDirectly is an all-in-one direct-to-consumer lab testing solution that replaces paper forms and manual processes with an electronic clinical lab workflow, which significantly reduces the potential for reporting errors. Just as important, the testing portal enables direct-to-consumer labs to increase their volumes and support organizational testing programs without sacrificing turnaround times.

The TestDirectly portal includes access control functionality, which, in the case of school testing, allows administrators to access results by facility, staff, students, or any other attribute. The platform automatically delivers test results to stakeholders (such as parents and guardians, school administrators, and public health agencies).

“The platform covers all aspects of direct-to-consumer lab testing and organizational specimen collection, testing, and reporting,” said Adam Carlin, TestDirectly’s Director of Implementation and Support. “TestDirectly keeps schools safe and students in class, and it fully supports laboratories at every stage.”

Learn More About TestDirectly

TestDirectly is an easy-to-use direct-to-consumer lab testing portal that provides turn-key point-of-care testing and clinical laboratory management solutions while connecting medical laboratories and collection centers with patients, physicians, schools, employers, organizations, and government agencies. 

TestDirectly utilizes automation to eliminate bottlenecks and support the collection and processing of specimens, creation/delivery of consumer lab reports, and management of payment and compliance, all while delivering a better patient experience.

LigoLab's Comprehensive Pathology Lab Software Suite for Laboratory Informatics

With the LigoLab Informatics Platform and the TestDirectly direct-to-consumer lab testing portal, medical laboratories receive more than just expertise from a seasoned laboratory information system software provider. 

LigoLab is a LIS company with a well-earned reputation for creating and delivering cutting-edge diagnostic lab software solutions that enhance operational efficiency, cut labor costs, facilitate growth, and empower labs to engage directly with patients for testing.

To discover how LigoLab’s LIS software solutions and direct-to-consumer lab testing services can help your laboratory stand out among competitors, expand its operations, and increase profitability, CLICK HERE to arrange a consultation with a LigoLab product specialist.