Parsons’ Carey Smith on Employing Innovation to Help Gov’t Respond to COVID-19

Carey Smith, president and chief operating officer of Parsons and a two-time Wash100 awardee, told Government Matters in an interview posted Tuesday about how companies leverage innovative technologies to help agencies respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

Smith said it is imperative for companies to come up with new platforms that could help people during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-crisis. In response to the crisis, she said Parsons sought ideas from its entire employee population and classified them into three campaign focus areas: integrated screening and testing, biosurveillance and digital transformation.

When it comes to biosurveillance, she discussed the company’s partnership with Fraunhofer USA to develop a diamond electrode biosensor to help test for the virus – SARS-CoV-2 – causing COVID-19.

When asked about the digital transformation aspect, Smith mentioned the capability of the workforce to telework during the pandemic and the benefits of virtual transportation management centers and other technologies such as advanced traffic management systems like Intelligent NETworks.

She offered information on the company’s integrated touchless suite of screening and testing platforms called DetectWise and how it could help facilitate health screenings at airports and other facilities.

Smith also cited the importance of having an agile and responsive culture to meet the needs of government customers.

“Our culture is one of agility, innovation, collaboration and disruptiveness. When you have a crisis such as COVID that hits, you need a company that can quickly come to the table, be responsive and provide solutions now. … By leveraging all of our employees, the entire employee population, through open-sourcing ideas, we came up with hundreds of various (solutions) that we felt we could help our customers. … For us, it is all about responsiveness and meeting our customers’ needs.”