With the massive scale of the pandemic hitting every country hard, one organization in the U.K. was recently recognized for it’s role in helping inform the public through an unprecedented time. In fact, the company helped automate systems to handle the high volume of calls to people in the U.K.’s Hampshire County to screen for those who needed the most help.

PA Consulting Group took on the task of automating these systems, landing them the Amazon Web Services Inc. Public Sector Partners Award for “Most Valuable Amazon Connect Deployment.”

Hampshire County is a large county in England, with a population of over 1.4 million. “For the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people, in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities, needed to shield and receive a variety of support. Shortly after that, through the summer of 2020, that number increased to some 50,000,” said Graham Allen (pictured, right), director of adults’ health and care at Hampshire County Council.

PA Consulting had an existing relationship with the city council and used its relationship with AWS and its knowledge of the AWS Connect platform to design a mechanism for making outbound calls at a large scale.

Allen and Steve Carefull (pictured, left), adult social care specialist at PA Consulting Group, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the automated call system, how digital evolution influenced COVID-19, what’s on the horizon for pandemic technology and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Full automation

Developing the automated call system was a joint task, requiring both entities to communicate with each other periodically. PA Consulting helped launch the Wellbeing Automated Call Service for Hampshire County Council in just seven days.

“We would improve the logistics of the service to make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls,” Carefull said. “We did that through a constant series of checkpoint meetings, staying in touch and treating this as a very collaborative exercise.”

The quick development of the automated system showcases how much technology has evolved in recent years.

“We are moving from some quite traditional ways of responding to that population that has been accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies,” Allen said. “What COVID has taught us is that, for many people, the virtual world connecting online and having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they’ve welcomed.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE