University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Scales COVID-19 Saliva Tests, Safely Brings Students Back to Campus

As places of learning and innovation, universities have tremendous potential to change the world through technology. One institution transforming this potential into a reality is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Illinois). 

Long before COVID-19 hit, Illinois was bringing data to everything — from classrooms to dining halls to playing fields. Coaches of the women’s soccer team, for example, use data insights from biometric sensors to inform practice and improve athletic performance. The Rokwire app leverages machine learning to provide students with opportunities tailored to their interests, such as advising sessions, campus events, transportation, housing intel and sports games.

When COVID-19 swept the world, the university pivoted quickly from perfecting its campus experience to delivering fully remote learning and collaboration. Nick Vance, manager of data and technology innovation, and his team were vital to driving a smooth transition.

“One of the first things we focused on was how can we understand how remote learning and Zoom classes are going,” says Vance. “We used Splunk Remote Work Insights to combine data from Zoom and learning management systems so we could monitor and secure our network.”

SHIELD: Target, Test, Tell 

By the fall of 2020, remote learning was running smoothly so they made the second strategic pivot to safely bring students back to campus. SHIELD was born. To even consider resuming the on-campus experience, the tech team knew fast, accurate COVID-19 testing would be invaluable. But with supply chain shortages and other difficulties plaguing nasal swab testing, the possibility of widespread testing looked dismal. 

University researchers channelled their inner Hannibal. They knew they had to either “find a way or make one.” So, they made one. 

A transdisciplinary team of campus faculty and researchers came together to create a new test. Their saliva-based test was faster, more comfortable and turned around results in a matter of hours, not days. 

To date, Illinois has impressively conducted over 1.3 million tests across campus. Using its existing Rokwire app — the university launched the Safer Illinois App — a central hub where students could easily report symptoms and receive exposure notifications on their devices. To account for asymptomatic spread, the university launched a mass testing regimen, requiring all students and faculty to test a specified number of times every week. Students who miss a certain number of tests lose their access to shared campus spaces like classrooms and fitness centers. 

“We were able to shift from a reactive to proactive approach to testing,” says Vance. “In this emergency situation, Splunk became the tool we relied on to automatically get out information quickly, whether it was sending testing data or alerts.” 

Real-Time Alerts, Plummeting Case Counts

When students first returned to campus in fall 2020, the health department needed to quickly follow up with students who tested positive for the virus. Due to the scale of the effort, though, students sometimes had to wait several hours or half a day after they received their positive results to find out what to do and where to quarantine. This increased the possibility of further transmission.  

In response, the university created a task force, SHIELD Team 30, to notify students right away of whom to contact, where to go, how to isolate and what other actions to take to keep themselves and others safe. “Since we started this initiative, we’ve seen a huge decrease in cases, and the way we got all this information to them was through Splunk,” says Vance.

“Splunk has been the backbone for automatic alerts and real-time data, which triggers downstream processes that allow us to text people immediately and prevent them from spreading COVID.”

With such a successful outcome, Illinois began dispatching real-time data to its housing department as well. “We began to immediately notify our housing staff about which resident in which room needed to be moved to one of our isolation rooms,” says Vance. “By flowing alerts through Splunk and sending the information to these teams, we better care for our students while controlling the spread.”

By using Splunk to quickly turn data into action, they’ve seen amazing results, including a sharp dropoff in COVID-19 cases (less than one percent) — even during times when case numbers spiked across Illinois. 

Scaling Proactive Prevention

With a smooth cadence of testing and informing students, the SHIELD team doubled down on proactive testing. When people check into a testing site, for example, they provide location and demographic information. With that data, Vance and his team now pull geographic-based levers that help keep case numbers low. 

“We turned our attention from alerting to larger scale analytics,” says Vance. “We now act on this demographic data by saying things like, ‘Hey, there’s three people that have tested positive in this housing building this week. We’ll tell the other residents to be more cognizant and to start  testing every other day until we get the infection back down in this area.’” 

As Illinois moves forward into the spring 2021 semester and beyond, Vance and his team will continue to use data to keep students and staff safe. The team also hopes to scale the impact by expanding their saliva-based testing and Safer Illinois App to the greater state of Illinois, as well as companies, school districts and healthcare facilities. 

To learn more about how they're using Splunk across the entire student experience, read the University of Illinois case study.