L.A. County Launches Digital Contact Tracing for COVID-19, Aiming to Reduce Exposure Notifications from Days to Hours with Healthvana

LOS ANGELES – As California’s counties reach sobering new milestones in COVID-19 cases, L.A. County and its partner, Healthvana, have taken a step to control community spread. Individuals with a positive test are now able to immediately and anonymously notify anyone with whom they have recently come in close contact, using their mobile phones.

By reducing COVID-19 exposure notifications from days to hours, officials hope to further reduce community spread by encouraging close contacts to quickly quarantine and obtain a free test. This is only one aspect of the County’s extensive effort on contact tracing which is led by the Department of Public Health.

Test result notifications are sent via text message or email the moment the lab processes the sample. With this added feature, individuals who receive a positive test result can easily click a link within the web-based patient portal to enter contact information for any recent close contacts.

These close contacts instantly receive a notification from Healthvana alerting them that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 with links to resources, including locations where they can schedule a free COVID-19 test.

The contact tracing feature will be initially rolled out to county-operated testing sites. There are over 180 total testing sites across the region which include county-operated sites, City of Los Angeles-operated sites, State-operated sites and locations run by community clinics, pharmacies, and various other testing partners. Healthvana has delivered over 750,000 COVID-19 test results to county-operated testing sites since late April. Los Angeles County was one of the first counties to deliver test results via Healthvana, which has been proven successful: 50% of individuals view test results in 10 mins or less; 75% view their test results in one hour or less; and 90% view their test results in four hours or less.