Coronavirus In Minnesota: Mayo Clinic Creates Team To Investigate And Identify COVID-19 Exposures 'Within Hours'
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The Mayo Clinic says it has tasked an "army of employees" with identifying coronavirus (COVID-19) exposures among health care workers in the hours after they happen.
According to a news release, "more than 230 Mayo physicians, nurses, project managers, IT specialists, computer programmers, health system engineers and call center staff" collaborated on the project, and almost half of them volunteered to do so.
In about two weeks, the organization says it's refined the entire process to an average of two hours.
Officials say that timing is critical in the operation because their goal is to catch people before they go into work. Immediately identifying health care workers exposed to a patient with COVID-19 can prevent the spread of the virus. For this reason, they're on the job at any time of the day or night.
To examine each case, the team say it "integrates medical record data with non-clinical information," to identify exposures, infectious periods, and the locations of potential further exposure.
Then they talk with people who may have been exposed, going through their contact logs, and consulting their supervisors and attending physicians.
The potentially-exposed people are also asked to complete a risk assessment with the help of a provider.
This system is currently being used at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and it'll be implemented in Arizona and Florida this week, according to a release.
"This is a huge improvement," says Laura Breeher, M.D., M.P.H., medical director of Mayo Clinic Occupational Health Services and one of the project's leaders. "The digital tools will add efficiency and position us to continue contact tracing even if the number of COVID-19 cases increases substantially."