An Academic–Health Department Community Partnership to Expand Disease Investigation and Contact Tracing Capacity and Efficiency During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Kendall A. Leser, M. Cameron Hay, Brian Henebry, John Virden, Mita Patel, Jordan Luttrell-Freeman, Jennifer Bailer
Abstract
Disease investigation and contact tracing are long-standing public health strategies used to control the spread of infectious disease. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, health departments across the country have lacked the internal workforce capacity and technology needed to efficiently isolate positive cases and quarantine close contacts to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This article describes an innovative disease investigation and contact tracing program developed through a formalized community partnership between a local county health department and local university. This innovative new program added 108 contact tracers to the county's public health workforce, as well as enabled these contact tracers to work remotely using a call center app and secure cloud-based platform to manage the county's caseload of cases and contacts. An overview of the requirements needed to develop this program (eg, hiring, health data security protocols, data source management), as well as lessons learned is discussed.