Automatic Contact Tracing for Outbreak Detection Using Hospital Electronic Medical Record Data
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Contact tracing is a well-known tool for public health professionals to trace and isolate contacts of known infectious persons. During a pandemic contact tracing is critical to ending an outbreak, but the volume of cases makes tracing difficult without adequate staffing tools. Hospitals equipped with electronic medical records can utilize these databases to automatically link cases into possible transmission chains and surface potential new outbreaks. While this automatic contact tracing does not have the richness of contact tracing interviews, it does provide a way for health systems to highlight potential super-spreader events and support their local health departments. Additionally, these data provide insight into how a given infection is spreading locally. These insights can be used to inform policy at the local level.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.08.20190876: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:4.1 Limitations: Automatic contact tracing can never take the place of the actual contact tracing process performed by tracers. Use of the EMR makes many assumptions. Among these assumptions are that the data available in the EMR is correct. Much of the information about address, language, race, ethnicity, are all manually collected …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.08.20190876: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:4.1 Limitations: Automatic contact tracing can never take the place of the actual contact tracing process performed by tracers. Use of the EMR makes many assumptions. Among these assumptions are that the data available in the EMR is correct. Much of the information about address, language, race, ethnicity, are all manually collected and transcribed into the EMR. Strong assumptions are also made regarding the geocoding of addresses. The geocoding as is may place two or more people within a particular apartment building, but this does not necessarily mean that transmission occurred between these two people. Establishing the exact transmission chain is not possible using the EMR information. For that reason, the estimated transmission chains trade a higher probability of error for the speed of identification of emerging clusters. 4.2 Next Steps: This methodology, while developed on SARS-CoV-2 and the associated COVID-19 outbreak could also be used for other infectious diseases within a given community. This approach could surface potential influenza outbreaks as well as other common infectious diseases (mumps, measles, tuberculosis, etc). Monitoring these infectious diseases and quickly surfacing links cases would allow the health system and the department of public health to work together to manage outbreaks and craft at the earliest possible stages of spread within a community. Use of genetic sequences could also be employed to further refine estimation of the transmission cha...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
