NCCU School of Law Alumnus’ Eyewitness Account of the Development of a COVID-19 Product — Emily Hales

NCCU School of Law Alumnus’ Eyewitness Account of the Development of a COVID-19 Product

BY EMILY HALES 09’

As the only attorney in the downtown Durham office of Validic, a cloud-based technology company, I was in deep thought when a member of our corporate affairs team approached me. She asked me what the company’s termination rights would be if Validic decided not to attend the largest industry conference of the year. It was late February, and the conference was weeks away. She explained that the company was considering withdrawing from the conference due to COVID-19. At this point, not many people were talking about COVID-19, and the word “pandemic” had not even crossed my mind. After reviewing the event’s contract, I advised the corporate affairs team of my legal opinion.

Ultimately, Validic was one of the first companies to pull out of the event, leading to the withdrawal of many other companies and the conference’s eventual cancellation. Ever since that moment early in 2020, I realized that I am fortunate to work for a company that is forward thinking and truly values its employees.

Each day, I have the privilege to work with colleagues developing and enhancing products to enable health organizations to better understand, engage, and manage their populations. I generally spend my days knee-deep reviewing contracts and providing legal analysis, but sometimes my days can take surprising, unexpected turns. One such day, was a day last March, not long after Validic employees had all started working remotely. I

knew that the company was working on a COVID-19 product, but I was not clear on how long the development would take to complete. About a week after first hearing of the development, I received the green light to draft the templates for the new product. I was shocked! Generally, products take much longer to develop. Normally, I would expect to hear discussions in meetings for weeks or months prior to receiving a request to develop a template. However, as the country was grieving the loss of many lives to COVID-19, and our health care system had been hit by a global health care crisis, Validic responded by rallying its workforce and producing an innovative solution.

Impressively, the Validic team developed its COVID-19 home monitoring solution in just two weeks – a project that would normally take a company four to six months to complete. Using our previous templates as a guideline, I worked with the senior vice presidents of products and technology to draft the documents for the public release. I also worked with the sales team to determine how to make our templates palatable for both new and established clients. Then, I worked with the finance team to include the new pricing model in our templates. I finalized the templates within days so they would be ready in time for Validic’s formal launch of the new product.

Although I was drafting templates, which can often be a mundane task for in-house counsel, this specific instance was especially thrilling! I was creating a template for a new product that could potentially save lives and prevent the spread of COVID-19. In those repetitive days – early in the pandemic – which all seemed to run together, we were flooded with news of sickness and fatalities and each employee was being classified as an essential or nonessential employee, I felt like I was doing my small part to help make the world a safer, healthier place.

In the development of its new home monitoring solution, Validic relied on its core products: a data connectivity platform and a remote monitoring solution. The offerings make personal health data – from consumer health and home-use medical devices – actionable in health care and wellness programs. Human Resource administrators were mobilized to monitor patients or essential employees for symptoms associated with COVID-19 and program administrators were able to enroll thousands of individuals quickly, allowing them to self-report coughing frequency, temperature, difficulty breathing, heart rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2) and other data into a secure web portal. Once entered, the individuals’ home health data is made accessible to clinicians and treatment professionals via a triage dashboard.

From the dashboard, the clinician or HR administrator is able to enroll new individuals, set alerts, identify trends quickly, and search the individuals based on the status of their latest reading. The solution also flags when a quarantine has concluded with no symptoms reported. By proactively monitoring for symptoms, individuals are able to seek testing or quarantine sooner, before the symptoms require emergency care. This also helps prevent the further spread of COVID-19.

I am fortunate to work at a company that values its employees and prioritized product development during a pandemic in an effort to save lives. Thanks to the development work of my colleagues, when I reflect on my legal work during the pandemic, I will remember that I was able to make a small contribution on a product that saved lives and prevented the further spread of COVID-19.