CDL Rapid Screening Consortium by Creative Destruction Lab
The CDL Rapid Screening Consortium (RSC), led by Creative Destruction Lab, is a privately led, not-for-profit initiative formed in August 2020 with the goal of establishing a robust rapid screening system and operational implementation strategy to be delivered as a public good to Canada and then the world. With the mission to develop a cost-effective system for reopening the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the approach was adopted to develop a system capable of conducting COVID-19 screens that can be administered for less than $1 per subject and produce results within 15 minutes with a false negative rate of less than 10% for infectiousness.
Driven by a common mission to seed the plan to bring the country’s economy back to normal, 12 companies came together to develop and implement pilots to screen for COVID-19 at workplaces across Canada. All together the project deployed 3,497 screening sites and conducted 2,089,337 screens. The guiding principle of the CDL RSC has been a comprehensive framing of the health crisis, specifically that the management of the COVID-19 pandemic is an information problem. A phased approach allowed the execution team to brainstorm, plan, implement, iterate, and scale each aspect of the workplace rapid screening program. The innovation model accelerated collaboration between government and the private sector and the project broadened understanding of health & safety to the workplace to improve public health.