Contact Tracing Investigations for Public Health

Using analytics and data visualization to identify at-risk populations to reduce disease spread.

How SAS® Enables Contact Tracing Investigations for Public Health

The swift spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for innovative solutions to modernize contact tracing capabilities. Used for decades to reduce the spread of communicable diseases, contact tracing has traditionally been a manual, time-consuming and resource-intensive effort. Fortunately, data visualization and analytics can help public health officials uncover insights from contact tracing investigations and publicly available health data – even if that data is scattered throughout multiple, disparate sources (e.g., case reports and emails).

Establish a contact tracing investigations database

  • Gather contact tracing investigations for public health data in a system optimized for analysis. 
  • Use identification methods to consolidate multiple records of the same individual. 
  • Establish and visualize links among patients, contacts and locations. 
  • Observe how linkages form over time.

Enrich contact tracing investigations for publich health data with external sources

  • Identify contact faster by quickly establishing better, more comprehensive links.
  • Integrate data from multiple sources – passenger manifests; public health enrollment; school, university and employee rosters; phone location data; and more.

Generate intelligent alerts

  • Dispatch alerts that convey health risk warnings.
  • Customize alerts for each contact (e.g., directing them to a designated testing facility at a specified date and time). 
  • Communicate alerts in the most appropriate manner – e.g., directly by a public health official or through automated channels (text/SMS messages, emails, etc.).

Why SAS® for contact tracing investigations for public health?

SAS helps public health officials and investigators make sense of overwhelmingly complex disease events, manage the velocity of alerts and understand disease spread. Our comprehensive solution combines robust link analysis and visualization with text and geospatial search and analysis, interactive network building, entity generation and contact analysis – capabilities that enable you to proactively identify risk contacts and superspreaders.

Make contact tracing investigations for public health more complete

Our data management tools can integrate data from many external sources and quickly deploy the right data to our cloud-native investigation and incident management solution, where you can easily create, triage and manage your contact tracing investigations for public health efforts.

Identify high-level trends

With SAS visualization capabilities, you can perform deeper investigations of contacts and data to uncover hidden patterns (e.g., common restaurants visited by contacts on a specific date) and share them across various health agencies.

Implement smart public health policies

Our advanced analytical modeling tools help you answer critical public health questions. And you can improve coordination among diverse agencies by using SAS data management capabilities to make better use of (and share) large volumes of contact data from a variety of sources.

Slow the speed of transmission

SAS has proven link and network analytics that can be used for epidemic investigations to more quickly identify sources of infection. And our powerful forecasting capabilities can help you predict cluster outbreaks and likely hot spots so you can take steps to mitigate the chances of widespread outbreaks.

SOLUTION BRIEF

Contact Tracing Investigations for Public Health

Identify at-risk populations and reduce disease spread using analytics and data visualization.

Connect with SAS and see what we can do for you.