CIC Health offers comprehensive COVID-19 testing and vaccination services that are accessible, fast, and easy. The health tech company operates dozens of public testing sites, provides testing services — including pooled testing — to more than 600 schools and organizations, and runs three mass vaccination sites: Gillette Stadium, Hynes Convention Center, and Reggie Lewis Center in addition to several community sites. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the company facilitated more than 1.6 million PCR tests in its first eight months and over 925,000 vaccine doses in less than four months.
CIC Health collaborates with private and public entities like CLIA-certified labs, physician networks, health care institutions, and state and municipal governments to streamline and expedite operations to meet public health challenges. It is a 2021 Fast Company World Changing Ideas and 2020 Massachusetts Tech Top 50 honoree, and a subsidiary of Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC).
CIC Health scaled its operations quickly in the short time since inception in Summer 2020, which included working in areas with multilingual populations. Alex Graziano was charged with the task of translating their website in a short time frame. It was imperative for CIC Health’s customers to communicate time-sensitive information and services for COVID testing and vaccination. They have a main website that integrates with several platforms using different technologies. Meeting the language needs of their guests was a challenge, especially due to tight time constraints and lack of developer resources.
"All of the different areas we serve speak lots of languages and we had to find a way to translate all of our various platforms extremely quickly. We needed a solution that minimized the development effort and decreased time to market." - Alex Graziano, Digital Production and Management
Alex was concerned that managing a traditional, file-based translation workflow would be an impossible task while focusing on the launch of new COVID-19 vaccination sites and expanding COVID-19 testing. CIC Health needed an agile solution that allowed them to communicate with customers in their native languages to meet the company’s equity and accessibility goals as well as various regulatory requirements.
With an ever-evolving landscape for its testing and vaccination services, as well as locations in highly diverse communities, CIC Health needed to translate new content in its main website and other platforms. Translated content needs to be ready almost immediately after pages are built to make access equitable and prevent delays in delivering services.
Localize offered a streamlined approach to translation management that allowed CIC Health to launch translated content into eight languages within hours. After installing Localize into their test sites, the automatic content detection allowed them to pull all of their content into the Localize translation management system for translation in minutes. The translation process was quick and easy, and they were able to deliver translated content to their site without developer resources. “Localize allowed us to solve very complex problems incredibly quickly using the JavaScript solution for websites. We couldn’t have launched our sites in such a short time frame without it,” explained Alex.
“Localize is really integral to what we’re doing at CIC Health. It allows us to focus time on other equally crucial aspects of our business and continue to produce fully translated sites incredibly quickly,” said Alex. The CIC Health team launched Localize live on its site within the first week of its subscription. They’ve now expanded their implementation to include their knowledge base and various connected sites. The company translated over 37,000 words and scaled to millions of visits per week in the first two months of 2021.
