National Contract Tracing Solution expanded to cover measles

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The National Contact Tracing Solution (NCTS) has been expanded to cover measles, allowing public health to operate on a national system and move work around the country if needed.

The NCTS is one of the national digital platforms stood up to help manage the Covid-19 pandemic, supporting staff to do contact tracing, health checks and case management.

Rob Hale, CRM analyst, digital channels, says measles was previously managed in local systems, on spreadsheets, and on paper, which meant there was duplication across the country.

"There was no national view of measles cases and contact management, so it was very hard for public health units to move work to different areas or to make connections in outbreaks between different areas," he explains.

He says the team spent around 12 weeks talking to groups in the public health sector about what they needed before expanding the NCTS to cover measles as a use case. This also resulted in national standardisation for a measles outbreak response.

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"Public health teams can now move work around the country if needed which provides business continuity, and they can make connections between cases moving across regions," he says.

"We could never do that using paper. And if we needed to stand up a call centre then we could get them on boarded as well."

Hale says the digital solution frees up capacity by enabling people who can interact digitally to do so, such as filling in a daily health check form rather than needing a phone call.

A positive measles result notification being notified via the ESR EpiSurv repository, also set under Covid, would trigger a response from public health.

Hale says public health staff are already familiar with the NCTS so it did not involve a lot of training to onboard them for measles.

He hopes the national solution will allow any measles outbreaks to be tracked and contained more rapidly.

Using the NCTS for measles is part of a wider piece of work to use technology built as part of the Covid response to provide value back to the sector.


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