Page 15 - 2020 OIT Progress Report

CONTACT TRACING AND CASE MANAGEMENT
The Campus Wellness subcommittee was tasked with finding the safest ways to learn and work on campus. The group’s recommendations included implementation of a daily symptom checker,
and implementation of contact tracing tools. OIT began looking into the burgeoning market for daily certification and digital contact tracing.
In China, for instance, a green Alipay code was required in order to freely move about. In general, this meant that there was low likelihood of exposure by direct observation of the locations
a person has visited. A key difference though
was this app was required. Clearly, it would be difficult to mandate such an application in the US. Several non-profit University groups were already investigating personal travel diaries and potential Exposure Notification Engines. Ultimately, SMU selected a pair of tools to augment symptom checking and contact tracing.
First, we partnered with the data collection
and analysis experts at Qualtrics to provide a daily symptom tracker, a faculty/staff COVID-19 notification form, and a tracking system for faculty/staff cases. A team was assembled of potential contact tracers, each completing the John’s Hopkins Contact tracing course. The team
included staff from the Bob Smith Health Center, Human Resources, OIT, Risk Management, and Student Affairs.
The second technology is PathCheck, an
electronic location diary with the potential to become an exposure notification engine. SMU chose PathCheck due to the extensive efforts for maintaining privacy. SMU faculty, staff, students, and visitors can download the app from an App Store and it will begin saving personal location histories. We liked this particular app because no data leaves your phone. The only time data leaves your phone is on the occasion you need to work with an SMU Contact Tracer. Even then, there is no name related data, simply locations visited.
Typically, new software configurations take two to six months to complete, yet the phenomenally dedicated team was able to power through this project in less than a month. The symptom tracker was live by the first week of school. The outcome is voluntary daily checks to help students, faculty, staff, and guests to remember to validate their health before starting their day. It is easy to forget without a prompt. By the end of the fourth week of the term, the Mustang Daily Symptom Check had already been used over 32,000 times.
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