Beyond the immediate threat to health and life that COVID-19 brings, it also carries an invisible toll in disrupted and delayed preventive and routine services that will bear long-term health consequences and mortality, regardless of age or geography. Overwhelm for hospitals and clinics, disruptions in services, delayed screening for routine care, reassignment of staff, and analogue supply lines exacerbate these outcomes. Health systems are called to transform to virtual models of care and implement new systems for contact tracing and surveillance. Additionally, we know unequivocally that underrepresented populations and underresourced communities are disproportionately affected by the novel coronavirus, with up to three times the infection rate and twice the mortality rate.¹

The leading cause of death in the world today is delay—delay in acute care and emergency response, routine screening, disease surveillance, inventory management, or staff resourcing. For low-income individuals, these threats to health are exquisitely time sensitive and largely curable.

In this current pandemic, we’re seeing a convergence of four factors that worsen health outcomes for people and increase the burden on healthcare responders, including:

• An exponential rise in patients requiring acute care
• Inequities by race, ethnicity, and geography
• Service disruptions and delays
• Rapid digital transformation required to manage increased and virtual patient loads

With the immediate and indelible effects of COVID-19 compounding each day, it’s imperative we work together to reduce both delay and inequities in healthcare. To help address these specific challenges and improve acute and longer-term health outcomes, regardless of one’s geography, race, or socio-economic status, PagerDuty.org will invest in partnerships, innovations, and models of care that improve health outcomes by reaching people faster.

Grants to Save Lives by Reaching People Faster

By providing healthcare organizations with the ability to orchestrate action in critical moments to save lives, PagerDuty can help tackle a pivotal piece of the healthcare system. We launched the PagerDuty.org Fund last fall to focus on Time-Critical Health with a mission to help save lives by reaching people faster, with a particular investment in underresourced populations. Specifically, we support health organizations that provide essential care to improve outcomes for the most underserved populations and for which technology is inherent in the solution.

PagerDuty.org will award unrestricted grant funding to generate extraordinary partnerships that scale impact in the area of time-critical health. As part of the funding, we also include free PagerDuty product licenses and product support to help your organization use the technology within your work (if your organization is not currently using PagerDuty, you must pilot it as part of this grant within the year). Nonprofits, NGOs, social welfare organizations, government entities, and for-profit social enterprises are eligible to apply.

In particular, we seek to help organizations:

• For whom time-critical healthcare is the central mission
• Whose work centers on reaching people faster and saving lives
• That use technology to drive efficiency, scale, and innovation in their solutions, and that can benefit from PagerDuty’s platform for real-time operations
• That prioritize the most underresourced populations
• That function within a health system

Examples of what we might fund:

• Vaccine preservation and delivery
• Health hotline reliability, triage, and orchestration
• Disease surveillance and contact tracing
• Medicine and PPE supply inventory and delivery
• Faster access to care and medicine

Apply for a Grant From the PagerDuty.org Fund

If your work is centered in reaching people faster to improve health outcomes and save lives, we encourage you to apply for a grant. We are accepting applications through July 31, 2020, and will announce grantees by September 15, 2020.

Learn more about PagerDuty.org’s Time-Critical Health funding and apply for a grant here. Join our live Q&A on July 15, 2020, to learn more about the grant round and PagerDuty’s platform for real-time action.

^{1 “The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequality of the Coronavirus,” The New York Times, July 5, 2020.}