Harris County (TX) EMS Agencies Pioneer Longitudinal Tracking of Personnel, while Keeping in Mind that Pre-COVID-19 Health Crises Persist.
By: Jonathon Feit
Tags: Covid 19, Covid 19 Crisis, Emergency Services, Data Science, Harris County

Thirtysomething miles to the south, Harris County Emergency Services District #48 (HCESD 48) similarly embraced the goal of gleaning useful information from data to show the impact of COVID-19 on their own operations. They wanted to learn how the proactive steps they took to mitigate exposure — including the application of longitudinal tracking software to “care providers-as-patients” — kept the coronavirus at bay.

Even during quarantine, Fire & EMS services have shined a spotlight on the value of information technology and interoperability when it comes to tracking patients who may be at heightened risk — whether that means high utilizers of EMS, patients with chronic disease, or patients with substance use disorders at heightened risk of harm to themselves or to others amid the stay-at-home stress of quarantine. (Some EMS leaders have advocated recasting the industry’s central practice as “mobile medicine” to better reflect this widening scope.) There is a growing recognition that the crises that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic — from substance use disorders, to the diseases that they can spread , to the psychological effects of extended loneliness— will persist in their impact even after the current virus is contained. This means that health, safety, and infection control officers must stay diligent and reject complacency, since other ailments could squeeze through any weak point in the phalanx.

According to Joseph Casciotti, Battalion Chief of Community Medicine at HCESD 48, software like MEDIVIEW TRIPS for tracking patient over time — whether applied to the public or to “care providers-as-patients”— helps reveal patterns of exposure that might otherwise be missed with reverberating costs in terms of readiness, liability, and even fundamental expenses like overtime to cover sick-out shifts:

“As the infection control officer, I can’t be everywhere at once. We do have a team of people that we deputized throughout this process and that have gone through the required training. But again, even though we have a group of five or six of us that are capable of being in that safety officer role, we can’t be everywhere at once. So the self-reporting thing is really key: It’s getting trends [on] what are our employees coming to work with. And really it’s going to be a matter of trying to catch a possible exposure or catch a possible infected employee early enough so that way they don’t bounce around — not only to different stations within our department, but a lot of our people work part-time or full-time in other departments. “You know, we’ve had the challenge of where we have people who are full-time with us or part-time with us that have worked in another department who have had an exposure at that department. If we don’t require them to do self-reporting here, we would never know about that. They’ve been taken off of work for X [number] of days or they need to be tested at the other department they work at, but if we don’t ask those questions here, then we are potentially having somebody that has been exposed and could be a carrier coming into our department.”

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Contact: Jonathon Feit, MBA, MA

Managing Consultant

The BrainTrust of Fire & EMS Technologists

Co-Founder & Chief Executive,

Beyond Lucid Technologies, Inc.

(650) 648–3727 or Jonathon.Feit@beyondlucid.com