A Web-based, Mobile Responsive Application to Screen Healthcare Workers for COVID Symptoms: Descriptive Study

Haipeng Zhang; Dimitar Dimitrov; Lynn Simpson; Balaji Singh; Nina Plaks; Stephen Penney; Jo Charles; Rosemary Sheehan; Steven Flammini; Shawn Murphy; Adam Landman

To date, there are over 1.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 throughout the world with over 330 thousand in the United States. This number is rapidly growing and the United States has become the epicenter of COVID-19. 1 By April 5 th , in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, there have been a total of 12,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 231 deaths. 2 The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projects that peak resource utilization in Massachusetts will occur in mid-April with potentially 373 COVID-19 deaths at peak and an intensive care unit bed shortage measured in the thousands. 3 . With the exponentially rising number of cases and limited resources, there is a growing recognition that scalable solutions such as digital technology can be used to address issues that arise from pandemics such as COVID-19. 4 To limit the spread and "flatten the curve", on March 16 th , 2020, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) and the Commissioner of Public Health issued an order that Massachusetts hospitals must screen all visitors, including employees, for symptoms of a respiratory infection (fever, cough, shortness of breath, or sore throat) and those individuals with any symptoms should not be permitted to visit. 5 Shortly after, our institution enacted a policy that all employees working in a patient care facility must wear a face mask while working as another measure to limit the spread of COVID-19 within the healthcare workforce. 6 We created a digital symptom screening and attestation tool whose output functions as the daily facility and face mask pass for the employee called COVID Pass. Using a prototype-driven innovation model combined with a transition to a more traditional custom development team as the application requirements matured allowed our group to rapidly deploy and refine a solution as it was released and approached scale. In under 2 weeks, COVID Pass transitioned from a paper proposal to enterprise supported solution that is currently being used by over 25,000 employees daily.