In 2020, New York State needed contact tracing at a scale no public health system had attempted before. It used CommCare together with Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center service, to run the case investigation and outreach side of that response across the state.
What CommCare did
CommCare gave contact tracers a mobile application for case investigation: recording confirmed and suspected cases, identifying exposed individuals, and monitoring them for symptoms. Because CommCare runs on AWS, the state could scale that application up quickly as case volume grew, rather than provisioning infrastructure ahead of a curve nobody could predict. Amazon Connect handled the outbound calling that reached the people those investigations identified.
“The State of New York used Dimagi’s CommCare platform and Amazon Connect to quickly deploy a cohesive contact tracing system that allowed public health officials to leverage scale and communicate vital information across the state. The powerful combination of Dimagi’s public health expertise, coupled with cloud-based technology, has allowed us to regularly improve our contact tracing application based on feedback from public health officials with speed and agility as this pandemic evolves.”
Mahesh Nattanmai, Chief Health Information Officer, New York State Department of Health
AWS’s article sets this alongside the wider pandemic response, including the scale of the contact tracing workforce the United States was projected to need and how other states approached the same problem. Read the full article on the AWS Public Sector Blog.
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