Digital Point Solutions for Extending Contact Tracing Capacity

Background 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.