Epi Contacts is a software application designed to elicit contact information from positive COVID-19 cases to help case investigation and contact tracing teams operate more efficiently. Epi Contacts receives positive COVID-19 case information, triggers SMS messages to be sent to eligible cases, and presents cases with a mobile-friendly web form that provides isolation instructions and enables submission of close contact information. Data received from cases is automatically and securely uploaded to the corresponding case record in the case management system. Event data -- including both user and API interactions -- are logged to enable downstream analytics around system utilization.
Epi Contacts was designed for and is deployed in production for the New York State Department of Health integrated with NY-CDCMS, a contact tracing system built on CommCare from Dimagi.
The development of Epi Contacts is sponsored by Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies.
This application was originally called Share My Contacts and that's
how it's currently deployed in New York. It was renamed to Epi Contacts
during a rebranding but the code lagged until open sourcing in June 2021.
There are references to Share My Contacts in content and metrics
to maintain backwards compaibility, for now.
The source code is published here to inspire others to do similar work, but it is not expected that the code be reusable in any other settings than those for which it was written. Anyone interested in studying the code should be able to download it and run the test suite.
The software is being actively developed on MacOS and Linux.
The application currently depends on Oban Pro, which is a commercial plugin to the queue manager Oban, and a (very affordable) license is required to complete the installation and run the test suite. We are working on making Oban Pro optional in the future.
Epi Contacts is not open-contribution. It was built for one user, and it's being maintained for that user only. Also, in order to keep Epi Contacts in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept pull requests or patches from unknown persons.
Copyright (c) 2021 Ratio PBC, Inc. The code is made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See also LICENSE.