No country was prepared for the onslaught of COVID-19, especially with its unprecedented global rise in 2020. Governments had to close borders, leaving millions of overseas Filipinos stranded abroad.

Flora, 26, had been working in Hong Kong as a domestic helper for the past six years when was suddenly asked to go home. Edwin, 38, a civil engineer based in Dubai, was laid off as his employer shuttered their operations. Edwin, Flora and hundreds of thousands of other overseas Filipino wokers (OFWs) remained stuck in the countries where they used to work, as there were either no available flights home or getting a seat in one was extremely expensive.

When OFWs and returning overseas Filipinos did manage to get a slot in a repatriation flight, they were faced with more problems upon landing. Countless forms waited to be filled out, and processing these meant having to spend much time at Ninoy Aquino International Airport—some, as long as 8 to 10 hours—increasing the risk of infection both among the passengers and airport personnel.

But their woes did not end there. Once out of the airport, they were transported to quarantine facilities and were only released upon having a negative COVID-19 reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR) result. This process took two to three weeks. Responding to a call

Realizing the critical situation, a group of friends from Xavier School, some of whom were still enrolled or having just graduated, sprung into action.

Brought together by their high school teacher, the founding team of Dashlabs.ai responded to the call of Sen. Richard Gordon to help digitize the COVID-19 operations of the Philippine Red Cross (PRC). The team was well-equipped and in a prime position to help having previously built the National COVID-19 Dashboard (covid19.gov.ph).

The Dashlabs.ai team, together with the PRC, wasted no time to work with key government organizations, such as the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, National Task Force, Department of Health (DOH), Department of Tourism, Department of Transportation, Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippine Coast Guard and more. The team digitally transformed COVID-19 testing in the country, shortening the release time of people in quarantine facilities from weeks to hours.

“Thank you so much . . . for doing your very best in helping Filipinos all over the world,” Flora wrote in an email when she got her RT-PCR certificate, allowing her to go home to her family.

Edwin wrote, “From the bottom of my heart and my family, maraming, maraming salamat po. Mabuhay kayo.”

Digitized operations

Apart from digitizing COVID-19 testing operations in isolation facilities and emergency field hospitals, Dashlabs.ai also helped introduce saliva RT-PCR in the country. Using data science to justify its effectiveness, saliva RT-PCR—provided by the PRC—received widespread recognition from both the government and the medical and scientific communities here and abroad. All of these advancements by the Dashlabs.ai team helped the PRC achieve more than 5 million COVID-19 RT-PCR tests to date. Vaccine operations of the PRC, in support of the Resbakuna program of the DOH, also ran on Dashlabs.ai software.

Dashlab.ai team’s efforts to lower prices and increase access to quality health care for every Filipino did not go unnoticed as Dashlabs.ai became part of the Winter 2021 batch of Y Combinator, which is arguably Silicon Valley’s prime startup accelerator.

True to its mission of simplifying health care, Dashlabs.ai has since expanded to modules beyond COVID-19 and has also partnered with many other labs and healthcare institutions. Many of these may be found on Dashlabs.ai’s website (dashlabs.ai), and they’re more than happy to partner with even more labs and health-care institutions.

“Unfortunately, whether it be hematology, clinical chemistry, clinical microscopy or immunoassay diagnostic tests, many labs continue to rely on paper-based systems, where laboratory professionals continue to spend 50 percent of their time manually encoding patient records, rather than accommodating new patients,” said Bryan Giger, chief executive officer of Dashlabs.ai. “We hope to address that by automating the key steps in the diagnostic process like collecting data, processing data and sharing lab results. We plan to build the world’s first DIY end-to-end lab software.”

When asked what young Filipinos can do to tackle pressing social issues, Giger stressed the importance of acting. “The problem might seem too large, too complex. And that may very well be the case. But that doesn’t mean we can’t chip away at it. We’re fighting for our future here,” he said.

The authors are students of Xavier School San Juan. They write about modern financial systems and Filipinos who overcame race, gender and class barriers.