Streamlining Yale’s COVID-19 response with the Salesforce platform

IT’s Salesforce Applications & Support team partnered with Yale Health to deliver a custom contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine tracking application for Yale Health plan members, including students, faculty, staff, dependents, and other members of our University community.

What is Contact Tracing?

Yale’s COVID-19 resource website describes contact tracing as “…an important disease control measure to prevent further spread of COVID-19. This process begins by asking individuals who are diagnosed with COVID-19 about people with whom they had contact while they may have been infectious. These people (‘contacts’) are then notified about their potential exposure without revealing the identity of the person who was diagnosed with COVID-19. Contacts are provided guidance on how to take care of themselves and prevent transmission to others.”

For more information, visit the Yale COVID-19 Contact Tracing Program website.

Delivering a Scalable Solution

The team was challenged with providing a streamlined, cohesive experience for the many University staff and units involved in the contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine workflow. These areas include resulting nurse teams, patient care, mental health and contact tracing staff, the isolation housing team, dining, residential college deans and heads of college, graduate school deans, university health and safety leaders, Yale Hospitality, and staff supervisors.

The solution integrated several enterprise applications (e.g. EPIC, Banner, the COVID-19 datamart, People Hub, and Qualtrics) with Salesforce to provide the best possible user experience for all involved. Positive test cases are fed into Salesforce from EPIC, processed by the resulting nurse team, and categorized appropriately. Students on campus testing positive would then be moved into isolation housing provided by the University. Workflow to manage the building and room assignments is handled with an integration to a Qualtrics form that gets completed by the isolation housing team.

The team delivered the following in only two weeks:

• Resulting (initial discovery call) workflow
• Isolation tracking for index cases
• Contact tracing efforts
• Quarantine tracking of contact cases
• Integrations with EPIC and COVID Datamart
• Complex notification processes for all involved (Deans/Heads, HSLs, Supervisors)
• Reporting and Dashboards for Yale Health Executives

The success of this application would not have been possible without the dedication and determination of Amy Lohman, Venkat Reddy, and Maria Belli from the Salesforce team as well as Jim Zarro from Yale Health IT. We also want to recognize Yale Health’s spirit of One IT at Yale and their continued patience and trust during this project. Many thanks to Dr. Christine Chen, Lindsay Azulay, Sarah Christie, Margaret Anderson, Lauren Horner, and the rest of the Yale Health team! We all appreciate the countless hours and sleepless nights you put forth to help keep the Yale Community safe.

About the Team/Services

IT’s Salesforce Applications & Support team provides over 1000 users, leveraging 45 applications, with an efficient way to manage processes for their department or center. For more information, visit the Salesforce Applications & Support service offering page.

This team also manages Yale Message, the University’s extensive digital marketing automation platform. Over 750 clients in 200 departments use Yale Message for their digital communication needs. Visit the Yale Message service offering page for more information.