VNSNY’s Data Science Team: Innovating to Create a New COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Tool

VNSNY has always responded to public health challenges with creative problem solving and a commitment to people in need, using new tools and on-the-ground insights to improve public health. Our work during the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The VNSNY Data Science team, for example, has been hard at work developing ways to better understand and manage the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. This work has led the team to develop a new contact-tracing tool that has the potential to help community-based health care agencies limit the spread of COVID-19 as cases continue to ramp up nationwide.

The application, VisitContactTrace, is an open-source application that can be adapted at no charge by organizations that, like VNSNY, deliver community-based healthcare to people who are typically homebound. The application lets users upload their own clinical-visit data in order to map the potential spread of infectious disease within the visit-based service delivery model—seeing which patients or care providers their COVID-19 positive patients or staff interacted with, and who this exposed group interacted with in turn—and work to mitigate the potential spread of infection by notifying any contacts who could have been exposed.

Anyone can access the instructions on how to install and use the application at the VisitContactTrace GitHub page. The tool can be used right now to identify the visit-based contacts of a COVID-19 positive patient or staff member, and can also be modified and enhanced by users over time to help practitioners and organizations better navigate future infectious disease outbreaks.

Rushabh Patel (top left), Naomi Shinoda and Carlin Brickner, VNSNY’s Data Science Team.

“Like all health care professionals, we want to do our part to reduce community spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases,” says Carlin Brickner, who heads the Data Science team and developed the tool along with Naomi Shinoda and Rushabh Patel. “The VisitContractTrace application is a tool that any community-based healthcare organization can use by simply importing the data that they already collect in their day-to-day operations.”

Innovation and collaboration around healthcare data have driven VNSNY’s care and commitment from our founding. A century ago, during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919, VNSNY founder Lillian Wald not only delivered vital home care but also pioneered a much-needed data collection system to help track influenza and other infectious diseases—a system that played a critical role in helping to reduce mortality rates. In the 1980s, VNSNY delivered care to some of the earliest HIV/AIDS patients, then went on to help pioneer approaches to treating, tracking and caring for the growing number of women who were contracting HIV/AIDS and transmitting it to their babies during childbirth.

Today, VNSNY’s Data Science Team is actively pursuing multiple investigations into the impact of COVID-19 on our patients and members, as well as on VNSNY’s operations. The team regularly applies advanced statistical methods, predictive modeling, and formal evaluation techniques to help solve a variety of business problems across clinical and financial operations as well as to support the improvement of the quality of care. The Data Science team also proactively disseminates their work into practice through innovative approaches such as publishing interactive reports and presentations and developing applications like VisitContactTrace.

“Our objective is to enhance collective efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases,” explains Carlin. “This is why we are making the VisitContactTrace application available to the open-source community, where anyone in the world can access the application for free—and potentially contribute enhancements that VNSNY can benefit from in turn.”