Creator of world's first digital ‘health passport’ says it will help open up economy again

Robert Quirke (pictured above), the man behind Health Passport Ireland, a digital platform designed to facilitate increased Covid-19 testing, says he has direct experience of the coronavirus and its effects.

“I’ve lost one family member to Covid-19, and another who is being treated for it has lost the use of her legs because of it, so to be honest, I’m very passionate about trying to do anything I can to help the situation,” Robert said.

“Having to watch the funeral of my aunt on a phone at home, and watching my cousins at the funeral breaking down and not being able to be there for them, I just thought, is this it now? Is this what we’ve come to?”

Built and engineered in Ireland by the ROQU Group, Health Passport Ireland is a platform that combines the latest digital technologies with accurate and validated Covid-19 testing solutions, which can deliver results in 15 minutes.

The digital platform is a big step towards helping businesses and individuals to quickly minimise risks related to Covid-19 and ensure they can continue daily activities. The system has been designed to work will all official Covid-19 test types.

The platform has been developed to help businesses to remain open through continuous proactive testing, and identify positive results at the earliest stage while simultaneously protecting communities by offering increased testing.

Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner from his office in Dublin, Robert explains that as ROQU Group is an international organisation, at the start of the pandemic, he knew what was happening elsewhere.

“We have really close contacts in Italy, and certainly in January and February I had very good visibility of what was happening there.

“People were being turned away from hospitals, and told ‘sorry, we’re full,’ and basically told to go home and die. I just happened to be in Dublin – normally I’d be travelling – and I understood that this was coming our way.

“I thought we have to do something to stop this happening here so I turned all of our company resources back to Ireland, to do what we could do to help here. We put a strategy in place which had three phases, and we’re in the third phase now.”

The ROQU Group have a number of international companies, a media company, ROQU Media International, working with governments and tourism initiatives, such as motor racing or music festivals.

“They’re for TV broadcast all over the world. One of our recent shows, apart from being broadcast on MTV in China and God knows where, was used by Virgin Media on St Patrick’s Day,” said Robert.

“We also have a capital investment business, that’s all infrastructure projects, and at the moment we’re talking to Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII). We have the luxury of being able to do projects that we really want to do, and if we do a project, we’re all in.”

Given the nature of his business, Robert is always travelling, but calls Mullingar, where his parents moved 15 years ago, home.

“My parents are in their 80s and are still cocooning, so every time I go back they have a list of jobs for me, whether it’s digging up rocks in the garden or cleaning the gutters or whatever. I was born in Dublin and then moved to Meath, but Mullingar is now our home.

“Our bank is in Mullingar. Some of the numbers are crazy, the size of the projects ROQU have, but I deliberately put the account in Mullingar to help the town. I remember meeting Miles Gillespie, who is the regional manager for AIB, and telling him what we do, and he looked at me as if I had about four heads,” laughs Robert.

Tackling Covid

As Robert explains, his company turned its full attention to tackling the virus, and did so in three phases.

“The first phase was labelled ‘survive’. We knew this thing was coming, so we needed to do everything we could to survive the first wave, because you beat this virus by living. We helped a lot of hospitals, nursing homes, charities, the HSE and Dept of Health to make sure they had the equipment they needed. We flew a lot of jets into Shannon, we used all of our political, business, and military contacts to jump to the top of the queue.

“Then we moved into phase two, which we called ‘Protect’. The virus was here so we needed to protect the staff and that was about helping hospitals and primary care centres making sure they had the equipment – masks and gowns. On St Patrick’s Day they had none. I got a call on the Sunday from a hospital in Dublin, asking if we could help. They had no gowns left, zero, and their staff were absolutely petrified.

“The guy who rang me had been up for days trying to source them and he was just exhausted. By 9am Monday, we had one million gowns and they arrived 24 hours later. We were happy to help as much possible when people needed.

“Phase three we called ‘Thrive’. This thing is here, and we have to bloody deal with it. It is now the world we’re in, and we still have to build houses, go to school, we want to go on holidays, watch a game, go to the pub. We need to get back to the feeling that we’re meeting this thing head-on and taking a step forward, and I don’t think anyone really feels like that at the moment, deep down.

“So Health Passport has been designed to do two things really: one is to protect society by identifying a potential infection at a much earlier stage than it is today. What’s happening at the moment is you feel sick, you do a test, and you’re told you have Covid.

“So we’re waiting for people to get sick before you test them – it’s not really a way to meet this thing head-on. With Health Passport, we’re putting a safety net in earlier in the stage of infection, so if somebody was positive, it would mean instead of them unknowingly passing it on, causing a cluster, that person knows earlier and can be treated sooner. So it stops the spread and gives them a greater chance of recovery.

“The other part of it is it protecting the economy. It helps companies to stay open. If this had been in place a couple of months ago, none of this thing would have happened with the meat factories and closures – that could have been avoided.

“Being able to test more regularly, once a week or two weeks, allows employers to know who has tested positive, and to know that the other 99 people working in a company have been tested too and they’re fine. So we can keep going without having to close down. Closing businesses a for two to a month is not sustainable.

“The Health Passport system will allow businesses to stay open, protect jobs, we need to start hiring people again, and start growing again. We need to give the power back to the people – this system allows you to know that you don’t have Covid, so you can go and meet your family.

“It’s about enabling people and businesses to take a step forward and get back to daily life.”

Pilot

Monitored by the HSE, ROQU are piloting the system at the moment with a number of organisations, including hospitals, nursing homes, logistics companies, farms and a hotel.

“We’re giving people the opportunity to be tested for Covid-19 every week, and after being tested – which is all done by a medical professional – you can choose to be set up on the Health Passport System, meaning your test results are saved there.

“That’s important for healthcare facilities, and for agency nurses who might be two days in a nursing home, a couple of days in a hospital, and a day in a private home every week. It’s important for those facilities to know that a person poses no risk of infection. It makes them a low-risk as opposed to not knowing at all.

“So we’re trying to bridge that gap a bit earlier in terms of understanding the status of a person.

“Another scenario is a hotel. If you want to go on a weekend away, taking you family or parents away for break, wouldn’t it be reassuring to know that all the staff have been tested for Covid.

“It’s important to know it’s a completely opt-in option

“What happens is after being tested is the health professional will set up you health passport account, it’s all done for you. You’ll receive an email, download the app on your phone, you set up a password, you get a text message with a security code, and you enter your security code and you would log into your private health passport account on your phone.

“None of the information about your health or test is saved on the phone, they’re saved on a secure database. It’s only when you click on the app to display your result that a live call is sent to the database, and the information is drawn down to your phone. As soon as you go off the screen, it’s gone. It’s a real-time link to a central database, so it’s secure and safe.”

Robert expects the pilot to run for between eight and 12 weeks.

“It’s important to note that during this pilot, there’s no cost involved. So we’re going to be delivering all of testing and medical services for free, the technology and support, for free. This should be a service for the people. We want to get the economy going again, tourism and travel going again. So I wouldn’t envisage an ongoing cost for the technology.

“I was adamant that this needs to be accessible for everybody. So while it’s very advanced technology, and it’s secure, people shouldn’t have to fork out €500 or whatever for it. It needs to be accessible for everyone and simple to use.

“It’s important for the international airline industry as well. Say you want to go to Thailand, or have a business meeting abroad, nobody wants to quarantine for two weeks. We have to get moving and kickstart our economies again.”

When do you expect to see things return to normal?

“The reason we can’t hold events like music festivals or parties is because of the risk of people dying from Covid-19. But if there’s a we can show there’s no virus at the event, then we can.

“There’s three ways to tackle it, open it all up, the virus goes wild and a lot of people will die. Nobody wants that. Option two is to keep the restriction going until there’s a vaccine. Then the question arises of how many will vaccinate against it. Also, I don’t think we’ll see one before Christmas 2021. Trying to produce 5 or 6 billion vaccines – people don’t realise the logistic challenge behind that.

“The logical and simple answer, which we can put in place now, is – put on a rugby match, before the match, test 500 people, and we will know for sure that nobody in that stand has Covid-19. That’s something we have the ability to do today. That’s a real solution that’s possible in the advent of rapid testing.”