Page 49 - FCW, July 2020

Although privacy concerns have limited the use
of digital contact tracing in the United States, companies are beginning to provide tools with robust privacy protections.
see whether they’re feeling ill or have quarantined themselves.
The second category of users is public health officials, who can analyze data on the number of people reporting positive diagnoses to home in on hotspots in specific counties, for instance, and take appropriate action.
The third user group is caseworkers who help arrange for food and medication to be delivered to people in isolation or quarantine. They can receive alerts about new entries, and the system can create tasks automatically so that if one caseworker’s workload is too heavy, the responsibility can be spread among several public health officials to follow up.
A worthwhile investment
To use Work.com, agencies need to be on the Salesforce platform. The low- code/no-code platform allows users to design and configure the interfaces, fields and forms to capture specific data. “All of that’s changeable and configurable,” said Kishan Chetan, Salesforce’s senior vice president of products. “Every state has its own nuances” and integration requirements. “We have a very well-defined way of essentially integrating data through our integration cloud as well as other services.”
The suite does not use artificial intelligence, a deliberate decision to help protect personally identifiable information. Patient data is not used in any AI models, Chetan said. “This is very protected health information, which we absolutely don’t want to run AI models on.”
Control and Prevention recommend contact tracing for monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and issued guidelines stating that technology is a necessity for efficient work in this area. “Case investigation, contact tracing, and contact follow-up and monitoring will need to be linked with timely testing, clinical services and agile data management systems to facilitate real-time electronic transmission of laboratory and case data for public health action,” the guidelines state.
Apple and Google are among the
other companies working on contact- tracing technology that addresses the public’s privacy concerns.
The technology is likely to be useful even after the pandemic recedes, Chetan said, which makes it a worthwhile investment for government agencies. “The world we live in, there are emergencies that happen...like a hurricane or a flood,” he said. Although the next crisis might not be a highly contagious disease, “this is a call to all of the state and local [agencies] to be prepared for an emergency like this.” ■
Officials at the Centers for Disease
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