Our Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), with vast expertise in health data systems, convened public health officials and technology leaders to landscape digital contact tracing tools and identify opportunities. The goal was two-fold: to develop guidance that assists public health professionals’ understanding of the current marketplace of digital tools and to ensure technology experts understood public health privacy needs and standards as they built these tools.
Within just six weeks, The Task Force team had finished its work and published a consumer report with a landscape analysis of digital tools to guide public health authorities’ decisions on their COVID-19 surveillance. As a part of this effort, PHII also produced guidance for public health authorities on exposure notification technology being developed by Google and Apple. The idea of the Google-Apple technology was simple: users could choose to enable their smartphones to exchange anonymous codes via Bluetooth with nearby phones. If someone later tested positive for COVID-19, they could enter a code and the other phones would get an anonymous notification that there had been a possible exposure.