Digital Point Solutions for Extending Contact Tracing Capacity

Initial COVID-19 surges in the United States created a need for technology to supplement human resources to increase efficiency and efficacy. METHODS: Resolve to Save Lives worked with jurisdictions to co-design four technology solutions—Epi Viaduct data pipeline, Epi Contacts contact elicitation webform, Epi Locator contact information search plugin, and Epi Viewpoint case management system (CMS)—to expand the capacity of case investigation and contact tracing (CI/CT) teams. We assessed impact on reducing CI/CT time intervals for COVID-19 using product data and user feedback. RESULTS: Epi Viaduct accelerated the transfer of approximately 7,400,000 records from an electronic laboratory reporting system in a single jurisdiction to the respective CMS from more than 2.5 hours to less than 1 minute and reduced time to remove duplicate laboratory results from multiple days to less than 6 hours. Epi Contacts focused on increasing the efficacy of contact elicitation, and during a single period, 10% of index cases (9,440 of 96,319) completed Epi Contacts for a total of approximately 18,700 contacts elicited. User interviews indicated the tool increased speed of CI/CT workflows. In total, 134,410 searches were run in Epi Locator by 7320 distinct users—75% of which returned 1 or more person matches. A simple CMS, Epi Viewpoint, was developed and completed, but not deployed. CONCLUSIONS: Systems to mount large-scale population-based contact tracing programs were developed and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and can be adapted for CI/CT programs aiming to control the spread of other communicable diseases such as sexually transmitted diseases.