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All this was done at low cost, making it as affordable as possible for the people and communities who needed support. As the number of tests performed increased, we were able to bring down the cost-per-test even further. 

We organized our testing support around these areas of need:

Hospitals and clinics

We worked with hospitals and clinics to provide regular and surge capacity for COVID-19 test processing. Health providers sent SARS-CoV-2 Real-time Reverse Transcriptase (RT)-PCR Diagnostic Assay tests directly to ӳ����ý for rapid processing and return-of-results.

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Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and homeless shelters

In certain settings where individuals lived in close quarters, it was critical to detect infections before there was much opportunity for transmission. In these settings, a healthcare provider determined that individuals were at elevated risk and should therefore be tested regularly. We partnered with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to:

• Provide ongoing screening of residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities, starting in Cambridge and then across Massachusetts: more than 78,000 people in more than 440 different facilities.

• Partner with Mass Senior Care in a weekly testing program for especially vulnerable populations in low-income senior housing in Chelsea, New Bedford, and parts of Boston.

• Partner with the City of Cambridge and a local ambulance service (ProEMS) to provide free testing to residents at neighborhood mobile testing sites and homeless shelters, and provided tests at no cost for 776 medically-vulnerable individuals in 16 low-income housing complexes.

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High-impact communities

ӳ����ý partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for the state’s “Stop the Spread” initiative, which supported free testing sites in regions across Massachusetts to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Educational Institutions

Higher education. ӳ����ý supported colleges and universities in Massachusetts and the surrounding area to enable regular viral screening for students, staff and faculty, including for the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters.

Primary (K-12) education. ӳ����ý supported pooled testing programs for K-12 schools in Massachusetts, coordinated by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and the Department of Public Health. These programs began in February, 2021 and continued for the 2021-2022 school year. DESE paired participating schools with one of three organizations coordinating the pooled testing — CIC Health, Project Beacon, or Tufts University. These organizations sent pooled testing kits to the schools, which collected the samples and shipped them to a laboratory. ӳ����ý processed samples from schools partnered with the three organizations. Our K-12 pooled testing program first launched in collaboration with Tufts University, for an initial program focused on schools in Somerville and Medford.

Partnerships to support testing

Several organizations worked with ӳ����ý to expand access to testing at scale. These organizations managed the logistics (such as creating contracts, support, site setup, scheduling, and return-of-results) and coordinated sending the samples back to ӳ����ý for processing. These organizations included:

• CIC Health

• Color

• Pro EMS

Processing cost and turnaround time

ӳ����ý reduced test prices to between approximately $15 and $25 per test, after initially setting prices at approximately $50 when the program began in the spring of 2020. ӳ����ý also shortened test turnaround times, using the same lessons around operational efficiency that have allowed the team at the Genomics Platform to help drive down the cost of genomic sequencing over time. ӳ����ý invested in new equipment and construction and hired more than 200 people to convert our CLIA-certified lab into a high-throughput COVID-19 testing facility. 

The facility provided results in approximately 24 hours or less from the time a sample was registered into our processing center.