Alberta Health sets the policy and direction needed to achieve a sustainable and accountable health system. Their goal? Promote and protect the health of Albertans. When COVID-19 entered Alberta. The Ministry of Health had to act quickly to establish a payment management system to support the critical workers that were providing support to their communities.

In just two weeks, we created a powerful online system that allows Alberta’s critical health workers and practitioners to apply for COVID-19 benefit funding and Alberta Health staff to process applications.

This application supports two programs. The first focuses on private health practitioners and organizations and the second focuses on public healthcare workers.

The Critical Worker Benefit program is a one-time payment of $1,200 for public health care workers to lessen the emotional and physical strain COVID-19 has had on them and their families.

The Critical Operator Benefit  supports the processing of payments to healthcare practitioners and private organizations across Alberta whose businesses and employees have been impacted by COVID-19. 

The Critical Worker and Operator Benefit application addresses both of these user groups and contains an applicant and reviewer interface known as the Operator Portal and Admin Portal respectively

Critical workers have played an integral role in keeping communities safe during the pandemic. More often than not, this means a heightened risk of exposure and feelings of isolation, stress, and anxiety. 

“Challenges faced by front line workers include a lack of resources to do their jobs, fear about their own health, guilt, shame, grief, exhaustion and a lack of guidance and training to navigate their changing roles.“

– Dr. Ashcroft, University of Toronto

The Government of Alberta recognized this challenge and set out to build a solution that would show support and give back to the people who needed it most. The Alberta Government needed an efficient and secure system to handle COVID-19 benefit funding and payment processing for critical health workers during the pandemic. 

From this, the Critical Worker and Operator Benefit project was born.

Launched in February 2021, this payment management system provides one-time $1,200 payments to over one hundred thousand healthcare workers who deliver critical services or support medical supply chains.

Through the benefit, the Government of Alberta aims to distribute up to $465 million in funding to eligible workers in two phases – outlined below. This includes up to $118 million in provincial funds, in addition to $347 million from the federal government’s benefits program for low-wage critical workers.

Total Critical Worker Benefit Funding: $465 Million

The Critical Worker and Operator Benefit application enables the Government of Alberta to distribute funds to eligible employees and practitioners in a streamlined, efficient, and secure process. With a proven record for digital government modernization, our team launched the initial phase in just in just two weeks.

All together, these two programs distributed:

FreshWorks worked collaboratively with Alberta Health to ensure agile principles were implemented at every stage of this digital government modernization project. Due to rapid policy changes and the urgency of these policies, our discovery phase moved in parallel with the design and development phases. 

Tight timelines meant we were building and launching features from the very first day. This meant the designs and actual code would have to be revised if requirements were updated. So prioritizing a user-centred design process was even more critical. It was important that every worker would have a seamless, intuitive experience to apply and receive the grant they are eligible for.

There are two portals within the application – the operator portal and the admin portal. Each of these portals has different functionality and features contained in it. 

Our development team has been at the forefront of building user-centered applications since 2014 and has built dozens of applications with these focuses:

Scalability

The backend of the Critical Workers Benefit application was built using NestJS, which provides a quick and efficient development process that is highly scalable and easy to maintain.

Ease of Use

The frontend was built using React, a JavaScript framework that makes the development and UI process intuitive and highly adoptable. 

The app utilizes IBM DB2 as an underlying database, hosted on IBM cloud. Benefits of IBM Cloud include reduced costs, easy operability, scalability, agility, and increased speed. It houses the data needed for the application to work seamlessly.

Self Healing & Portability 

Kubernetes was a container orchestration platform used to deploy and manage the application. Failed containers can easily be replaced with new healthy containers, and it can be used on a variety of different infrastructures – a public cloud, a private cloud, or on a premises server.

The Critical Workers Benefit project delivers aid and recognizes Alberta’s critical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are very fortunate to have worked on an impactful project that will streamline benefit distribution throughout the province during a time of unprecedented uncertainty and change. We look forward to our continued partnership with Alberta Health with the vision to improve access to accessible, inclusive citizen services throughout the province.