OHW 105 - Automating Communicable Disease Exposure Follow-up

Background: A thirteen hospital healthcare system in central Texas evaluated the feasibility of performing electronic healthcare worker (HCWs) communicable disease exposure (CDE) notification, evaluation, and follow-up.

Methods: For this study, an electronic process was developed to notify and evaluate potential CDE. Following Infection Prevention (IP) confirmation of an exposure event, potentially exposed HCW email addresses are loaded into a database linking potentially exposed HCWs to the source patient, possible dates of exposure, and disease-specific CDE criteria.

Individual email notifications are automatically generated from the database directing HCWs to conduct an electronic disease-specific exposure self-assessment. HCWs whose self-assessment indicates no exposure are notified at the time of assessment completion that no further action is required. HCWs that report an occupational exposure are routed to an Associate Occupational Health (AOH) dashboard for post-exposure follow-up. HCWs receive a daily email reminder to complete the exposure self-assessment for 5 days or until the assessment is completed.

Results: From January - November 2023 there were 104 exposure events with a total of 1634 HCWs with a potential CDE. A total of 865 (52.9%) HCWs completed their exposure self assessment and 620 (70.3%) of HCWs who completed their exposure self-assessment met criteria for CDE. Response rates were higher among HCWs with an organization-affiliated email address (58.4%) than HCWs without (37.9%) (p < 0.001). IP and AOH staff informally reported less time spent conducting investigation into CDE during the study period.

Conclusions: CDEs are a high-volume occurrence within healthcare organizations and require significant resources to investigate and provide follow-up. Efforts to streamline and automate processes around exposure notification and follow-up are necessary to help create efficiencies within IP and AOH departments. Use of automated email notifications to individual HCWs is one approach that can be considered.