Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) screening system utilizing daily symptom attestation helps identify hospital employees who should be tested to protect patients and coworkers

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of a daily attestation system used by employees of a multi-institutional academic medical center, which comprised of symptom-screening, self-referrals to the Occupational Health team, and/or a COVID-19 test. Design: Retrospective cohort study of all employee attestations and COVID-19 tests performed between March and June 2020. Setting: A large multi-institutional academic medical center, including both inpatient and ambulatory settings. Participants: All employees who worked at the study site. Methods: Data was combined from the attestation system (COVIDPass), the employee database, and the electronic health records, and was analyzed using descriptive statistics including chi-squared, Wilcoxon, and Kruskal-Wallis tests. We investigated whether an association existed between symptomatic attestations by the employees and them testing positive for COVID-19. Results: After data linkage and cleaning, there were 2,117,298 attestations submitted by 65,422 employees between March and June 2020. Most attestations were asymptomatic (99.9%). The most commonly reported symptoms were sore throat (910), runny nose (637), and cough (570). Of the 2,026 employees who ever attested symptomatic, 905 employees were tested within 14 days of a symptomatic attestation, and 114 (13%) of these tests were positive. The most common symptoms associated with a positive COVID-19 test were anosmia (23% vs 4%) and fever (46% vs 19%). Conclusions: Daily symptom attestations amongst healthcare workers identified a handful of employees with Covid-19. While the number of positives was low, attestations may help keep unwell employees off campus to try to prevent transmissions.

Screening Technologies to Support Infection Prevention and Control in Long-Term Care

“…Automation and virtualization. Electronic symptom screening systems have many benefits when compared to traditional verbal or paper-based systems, and have been shown to be somewhat effective in detecting infections (Kim et al, 2022). Therefore, in-person, staff-deployed screening technologies should be automated and made virtual where possible.…”

“…Therefore, in-person, staff-deployed screening technologies should be automated and made virtual where possible. For example, seeing as the majority of daily screening responses from staff in self-screening questionnaires are negative (99.9% in one study by Kim et al, (2022)), a screening questionnaire employed online would eliminate or reduce the contact time among staff at entries who have already identified themselves as not displaying symptoms.…”

Notes From the Field: A Voice-Activated Video Communication System for Nurses to Communicate With Inpatients With COVID-19

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the unprecedented adoption of virtual care tools [ 1 - 3 ]. Ideally, virtualizing patient encounters in the inpatient setting can preserve the sense of human contact and increase capacity for human connection with patients while making interactions feel less rushed [ 4 ].…”

Variations in operating room staff compliance with mandatory daily electronic COVID-19 symptom screening

“…Electronic symptom screening systems have multiple advantages compared to verbal or paper-based systems 5 and demonstrate some efficacy for detecting infections, 6 but actual individual staff compliance with these systems is unknown. In operating rooms, staff must be physically present and social distancing is difficult to implement, so compliance with symptom screening may be particularly important to prevent staff-to-staff transmission.…”