Life Amid COVID-19: We're All In

Bellese Technologies, in conjunction with Code for Baltimore, is now dedicating employees’ time to developing an open source application to allow municipalities to track the status of healthcare providers during and after a disaster. But we didn’t stop with our core strengths. The Bellese Team has taken its passion for helping in this crisis by pitching in in various ways.

Image Courtesy of @pere.ozogu on Instagram

Bellese veteran Full-Stack Engineer, Pere Ozogu, has made over 150 masks and delivered them to various care facilities in the Baltimore area. Another employee is volunteering to deliver meals on wheels. And owners Pam Offutt and John DuClos have announced that Bellese will be matching all COVID-19 related donations 2-1. To date, employees have donated $4,600 to 16 organizations, and Bellese made $10,000 in additional donations to these organizations.

“Our employees are very passionate people. They jumped at the opportunity to use their skill set for the greater good of the community and Bellese is committed to supporting that initiative.” said Pam Offutt, CEO of Bellese.

Since its inception, Bellese has encouraged employees to participate in civic innovation opportunities like Code for Baltimore (CfB). When COVID-19 hit, it was clear to Bellese co-founders, Pam Offutt and John DuClos, that action was needed to allocate a group of Bellese employees to provide support to a CfB project that was already in progress.

This particular CfB project, Healthcare Roll Call, was designed with the goal of leveraging technology to track the status of individual healthcare providers during and after a disaster. This would eliminate the need for cities or municipalities to invoke antiquated phone chains immediately following a natural disaster. In mid-March, CfB decided that their project could easily be re-prioritized to fit the needs of cities and municipalities who want to stay abreast of healthcare providers’ status amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.

Five Bellese employees with diverse skill sets are currently contributing to the development of this scalable application to benefit municipal governments for a total of eight weeks. “There is so much need for help during this crisis”, says Jason Anton, Bellese employee and CfB Technical Lead. “I can’t sew, and I’m not a healthcare professional, but I can code. I can do this. Bellese has empowered me to help how I can, where I can. I am proud to do my part.”

The team started by applying the processes and agile methodologies that they use in their everyday work at Bellese to build an exceptional product. They have created a user story map which outlines the progression of interactions a user has within the application and are identifying application features that will be ready for future development.

Team members work collaboratively with CfB participants with the goal of creating a product that can be easily adapted by any city or municipality with a desire to track healthcare provider status. Bellese firmly believes that by providing innovative solutions, they can contribute to improving the healthcare journey of Americans.

The open source code base can be accessed here: https://github.com/CodeForBaltimore/Healthcare-Rollcall