Before we could administer and process our first COVID-19 test, we had to understand the magnitude of the problem, how to measure potential transmission on campus, what safety protocols were required, and how to collect samples and conduct tracing.

To tackle such critical questions, we established the Medical Advisory Group (MAG), a team of medical and public health experts.

“In April 2020, we were talking about what our public health and testing protocols would look like,” says MAG leader Dr. Judy Platt, chief health officer and executive director of Student Health Services (SHS). “We had guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and various public health departments, but how we actually do this on a college campus was something no one knew. We decided to create our own polymerase chain reaction (PCR) clinical testing laboratory and hire a staff dedicated to essentially creating a public health agency at BU.”

Platt’s team of senior leaders from Student Health Services, together with those from Occupational Health, along with Tracy Schroeder, chief data officer and vice president of Information Services & Technology (IS&T), helped develop and establish Healthway, a website initially designed as a central source of information and a place for BU community members to complete daily health attestations and schedule COVID-19 tests.

But Healthway grew to be so much more. It became a unified University health service dedicated to reducing the transmission of COVID-19 on BU’s campuses.

They devised a layered approach to promoting awareness, monitoring viral transmission, and adaptive testing to identify clusters. Meanwhile, IS&T and SHS staffers developed communications, scheduling, workflow, and data-management tools to support the testing along with data models and a public dashboard to monitor results and infection rates.

By the time testing began in August of 2020, the Healthway team had assembled a case-investigation and contact-tracing program, led by Hannah Landsberg (Sargent’13, SPH’13), staffed by BU alumni, School of Law and School of Public Health students, as well as journalists, research assistants, and data analysts to track down close contacts and advise on quarantining and isolating.

And once vaccines became available in the spring of 2021, the Occupational Health and Student Health Services teams set up clinics and trained medical and dental students to administer shots. (Eventually, we made vaccines mandatory for all members of the BU community.)

At this year’s Commencement, President Robert A. Brown honored the hard work that went into reopening campus and keeping the University safe, singling out Platt and the Healthway team, whom he described as “200 patient and splendidly conscientious individuals. We are forever in their debt.”