Helps public health authorities, businesses, education, and other organizations protect families, communities, students, and employees.
I had the opportunity to speak with Phillip Dennis, Principal at Watkyn LLC about ContactPath COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing software. I was surprised he had time to speak with me given the need for contact tracing solutions around the world.
Contact tracing and case investigation are two of the most important public health tools for protecting the health of communities and economies from COVID-19 and future infectious diseases.
Public health officials are overwhelmed and understaffed. According to the CDC, more than 100,000 contact tracers are needed in the U.S. And few, if any, health departments know how to get started with a contact tracing program.
Phillip and his team developed ContactPath to bring structure and process to the program by enabling a dramatically smaller workforce to perform at a superior level.
The platform is built to capture and process data as recommended in the CDC’s “Health Departments: Interim Guidance on Developing a COVID-19 Case Investigation & Contact Tracing Plan,” and comply with privacy and data security regulations, ContactPath streamlines the workflow for users, enabling data to be collected quickly and entered manually or imported from other sources.
According to Phillip, “As we watched this crisis unfolding, we realized that smartphone exposure notification apps were never going to replace skilled person-to-person contact tracers. With our experience building software that improves business processes, we engineered ContactPath to be powerful and complete, yet flexible, easy to learn, and simple to use in the fight against the Coronavirus.”
The solution is cloud-based and can be accessed by any device that has internet access. It’s also built to meet privacy and data security requirements. Dashboards are customizable by job or role. The platform maintains records of all case management activities, enables the assignment of team members to specific cases or takes on new cases in the backlog, and tracks symptoms, quarantines, and outbreaks.
Administrators can create their own questions or use the built-in questions suggested by the CDC. Close contacts can be notified of possible exposure to a COVID-19 positive person by SMS, voice recording, or email.
Users are able to get up and running with their program the same day they begin using the platform.
It will be interesting to see if ContactPath gets traction with everyone who’s trying to reopen the economy in a responsible way. Given the money governments are throwing are pharma companies and vaccine manufacturers well before a vaccine has been identified, this seems like a “no brainer.”