All around the world, Microsoft’s innovative partners are working hard to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. While some are developing brand new products and processes to support the healthcare industry, others are finding creative ways to repurpose their existing offerings to drive meaningful change.
For the last 15 years, Atos—a global leader in digital transformation—has been providing critical digital infrastructure for some of the largest events in the world including national events and international sporting championships. Across all of these events, Atos identified a common and pressing challenge: organizing and communicating with high volumes of volunteers. Due to COVID-19, this challenge is becoming more and more prevalent in the healthcare space as overburdened health systems are being forced to bring on volunteers to keep up with demand.
Managing volunteers at scale is incredibly difficult. For example, large sporting events often require thousands of volunteers selected from a pool of even more applicants. Event organizers and sports governing bodies—and now health systems—need a way to effectively choose volunteers and match them with open roles based on skillset and availability. To address to this challenge Atos designed the Managed Volunteer Portal. Now, they’re customizing it for healthcare and providing platform design at no cost.
What does the Managed Volunteer Portal do?
The Managed Volunteer Portal is a cloud-based service that can support any event with volunteers. The portal allows volunteers to self-register and manage their application status. They fill out basic demographic and personal information including their interests, skillset, accreditations, and availability, then the application automatically helps the sponsor organization find the best volunteers to fill each role. The portal is simple, intuitive, customizable, scalable, and available in most languages.
How is the data secured?
Security was a top consideration for Atos when designing their portal – it was critical that all user data was kept protected in strict compliance with international data privacy regulations. After carefully assessing their options, Atos selected Microsoft Azure as the portal’s cloud platform. Atos has been a Microsoft partner for over 20 years. As a member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, they have attained several Microsoft gold competencies and are a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. With their shared values on the importance of security, Atos knew that Microsoft would be the perfect partner for their Managed Volunteer Portal.
Not only does Microsoft Azure offer built-in, best-in-class security, it also offers localized data storage in numerous regions around the world, enabling customers to keep their data local and maintain regulatory compliance. In fact, Microsoft Azure boasts over 90 compliance certifications, over 50 of which are specific to global regions and countries, making it the ideal cloud provider for international organizations like Atos who support customers and events worldwide.
Pivoting the portal from sports to healthcare
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Atos has found a new use for the Managed Volunteer Portal: healthcare. Hospitals and healthcare systems alike are being pushed to their limits with a massive influx in highly contagious patients, forcing many to bring on volunteers for help. Just like the organizations behind large sporting events, governments and health departments need a way to manage all these volunteers and assign them to roles while protecting their personal data. Atos’ portal fills this need perfectly, allowing healthcare administrators to communicate directly with individual volunteers or with large groups all at once. Because service reliability is paramount, the portal is built with features like waiting rooms to support high volumes of traffic, ensuring that the service stays online even during peak usage.
Atos is doing more than just customizing their portal for COVID-19 response though, they are offering it for free to any lead health service or equivalent organization with volunteers who are helping a national or regional health service. This offer also includes in-depth training and Atos’ advanced support package, free of charge. This show of generosity is yet another way that our partners are going above and beyond to support people and organizations during these challenging times.
If you would like to request access to the Managed Volunteer Portal, please send an email to marketing@atos.net. If you would like to learn more about how Atos is responding to COVID-19, please visit https://atos.net/en/future-proof.
If you would like to learn more about how Microsoft and our partners are responding to COVID-19, please visit our Partner Network response guide.