Press Release

HKBU wins IDC Digital Transformation Awards (DXa) 2020 Special Award for Resiliency for its Health Declaration System

Wednesday, 21 Oct 2020

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) has received the IDC Digital Transformation Awards - DXa 2020 Special Award for Resiliency for the HKBU Health Declaration System in this year's IDC DX Summit, by IDC Hong Kong.

The IDC Digital Transformation Awards, Hong Kong, is one of the top worldwide prestigious IT awards in the industry. The award scheme recognises outstanding organisations that have made critical breakthroughs in digital transformation throughout the Asia Pacific region, spread across seven different categories. This year a special award for resiliency was presented to organisations who have reimagined their business in the new normal.

The HKBU Health Declaration System, developed by HKBU's Office of Information Technology (ITO), was selected among over 1,200 high-quality entries received from organisations across the Asia Pacific region. Faced with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the System is part of HKBU's efforts to step up preventive and control measures to safeguard the health and safety of the University community.

HKBU is the first university in Hong Kong to introduce a daily health declaration policy and an integrated real-time Health Declaration System in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the University management's decision in late January this year to introduce a health declaration mechanism for its campus, the System was launched within 2 weeks and subsequently acquired full functionality in less than a month.

Based on users' self-declared data, which is inputted through a health declaration form on the secure HKBU Mobile App, the System keeps track of any COVID-19 related symptoms and the relevant travel history of staff, students and registered visitors. It also controls their access to the campus and presents real-time data to a dashboard for actionable insights to support risk management and resource planning.

Besides collecting health and travel information through the HKBU mobile App, the System operates seamlessly with the Campus Access Smartcard Readers System, which includes readers at all campus entrances, ensuring that only those without any symptoms of sickness and without recent travel history to high COVID-19 risk areas will be allowed to access the campus. From the user side, new health declaration functionality is added to HKBU Mobile App, a highly extensible App developed with Smart Campus/Mobility in mind. The whole process takes place in real-time with the results securely and simultaneously sent to the University's on-premises data centre.

Since its inception, the System has realised a 100% smooth usage adoption by students and staff, and it has processed around 600,000 health declaration responses.

“The COVID-19 crisis is transforming the entire education industry and, to maintain business continuity, digital transformation design for resiliency has become a top priority that every organisation needs to look into, especially in the post-pandemic era,” said Mr Allan Wong, Director of Information Technology at HKBU.

The COVID-19 situation around the world continues to develop. With its dynamic and flexible design, the HKBU Health Declaration System can adapt quickly to the ever-evolving preventive and quarantine policies imposed by local health authorities, as well as the emerging requirements the University needs to fulfil in order to ensure a safe campus environment for its community.

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