Deloitte Helps City of Cascais Better Manage Pandemic Response and Increase Citizen Confidence with AWS

Like many places across the globe, Cascais, Portugal, was unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The municipality of more than 214,000 residents quickly became concerned as virus cases continued to climb every day. “Nobody was really ready for COVID-19,” says Marco Espinheira, head of future for Cascais. “From day one, we needed a better understanding of what was going on and how the virus was impacting the city and our citizens.”

Cascais knew it needed a technology solution to better protect its citizens while getting updated information out as soon as possible. “We wanted an integrated management system for the overall health situation,” says Espinheira. “We wanted to efficiently manage the municipality’s resources and get a real-time view of the spread of the virus.”

To meet these requirements, Cascais chose to expand its relationship with Deloitte, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner and strategic global systems integrator. Cascais had already been using Deloitte Synergy, an integrated city operating system that features different operational modules for optimizing efficiency, coordinating city services, and engaging with citizens. “Cascais wanted to collect real-time data about COVID-19 cases,
but the city needed a centralized way to gather and manage that data,” says Ricardo Martins, associate partner at Deloitte.

Deloitte collaborated with the municipality to create a COVID War Room solution, which is based on AWS services including AWS IoT Core. This solution collects data across different city systems and integrates it into Synergy to help the city to provide new services to its citizens such as integrated crisis management, suspicious case monitoring, test scheduling, results management, and critical resources availability monitoring.

Using the solution, Cascais citizens can book COVID-19 tests by calling a hotline. Call center operators check Synergy Command for real-time testing facility availability and then schedule test appointments. Synergy Command automatically sends appointment details to a testing center using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda integrations and then sends the appointment information to citizens via SMS. The solution also informs citizens of test results as soon as the testing facility provides them.

Cascais administrators can access dashboards and COVID-19 maps, which run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Dashboard graphs show neighborhoods that have the most virus cases, helping the municipality quickly decide where to deploy resources. “We worked with Deloitte to quickly implement this solution, which we couldn’t do without a high degree of digitization, which we already had with Synergy,” says Espinheira.

Deloitte participates in the AWS Partner Smart Cities pilot program, which provides strategic support for AWS smart cities partners. Through its involvement in this program, Deloitte can communicate with other AWS partners and receive promotional and business plan support from AWS. “Through the AWS Partner Smart Cities pilot program, we received strong technical support from AWS in addition to finding ways to connect with other
AWS partners in this space,” says Martins.

By using the Deloitte COVID War Room solution on AWS, Cascais has an integrated, holistic overview of the pandemic’s impact on the municipality and its citizens. For example, Cascais can view updated suspicious cases, test schedules, and infection and disease spread locations in a single platform. “With updated COVID-19 data at their fingertips, municipality administrators can quickly identify areas where the virus is more prominent, so they can attack those areas quickly,” says Martins. Through February 2022, Cascais carried out more than 100,000 COVID tests via online scheduling
in partner laboratories.

Through dashboard analysis, Cascais can provide concrete actions such as choice of mask distribution points, locations for raising awareness, sessions in nursing homes and day care centers, and testing of citizens and employees. The city’s bus management team also received information about outbreaks and could direct buses for rapid testing at those points. Additionally, the city can monitor asset availability such as ambulances, hospital beds, and the number of patients so city staff can quickly mobilize resources to the areas with the most need. As a result, Cascais avoids facility overcrowding and testing scarcity scenarios. “The Deloitte solution on AWS gave us centralized, real-time information so we could initially deploy cleaning services immediately to the most impacted neighborhoods,” says Espinheira. “After that, we used the solution to quickly deploy mask distribution centers, testing locations, and, eventually, vaccination sites to citizens throughout the municipality. Overall, this solution has helped us effectively contain the spread of the virus.”

Cascais uses the Deloitte COVID War Room solution to better engage citizens and directly involve them in the fight against the pandemic. By interacting with Synergy, citizens share information on their health by reporting cases, close contacts, and test results, which helps Cascais better measure the impact of its efforts. “We are using the data we collect directly from our citizens to actually incorporate the services we’re providing, such as testing and vaccination,” Espinheira concludes. “This not only helped us get the pandemic under control relatively quickly, but it also gave our citizens a sense of confidence and trust in the government in terms of our initial response and continued management of the pandemic. This will help us meet our goal of restoring economic activity to a normal level in Cascais.”