Sonoma County teams up with IBM for app that would track employee health

Tech giant IBM is developing a smartphone app for use by Sonoma County employers to screen workers for COVID-19 symptoms, adding a repository of local health data and a new communication tool to the county’s arsenal in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

Existing IBM Community Health software serves as the platform for the local app, dubbed “SoCo COVID-19 Check,” and it will be customized to the county’s “return to work needs,” according to an IBM North America spokeswoman.

County officials submitted the app for Apple’s review process Monday, but the county has offered no firm timeline for its release, tying its use to Health Officer Sundari Mase’s review of statewide pandemic benchmarks and the county’s ability to reopen its own government offices.

But the app could be rolled out among other employers in local government and the private sector as well, once in-office work begins to resume. The app is designed to be a quick, simple and standardized tool to help workers checking themselves for symptoms, while allowing employers to monitor the health of their staff and enabling the county to oversee a broader set of public health data.

“It makes it a much easier process than if every business has their own way of meeting the requirements that we’re setting out for opening,” Mase said Friday.

The technology project is advancing as efforts to suppress the virus in Sonoma County have kept case totals relatively low, with no surges and deaths limited to three people 65 or older. But with more than 77,000 ?COVID-19 deaths in the nation, and thousands of new cases every day, the pandemic continues to grow, even as California and its communities start to send more people back to work and reopen economies.

Those steps have spurred employers large and small to seek ways to safeguard returning workers and keep tabs on their health as the pandemic plays out, with no vaccine or cure in sight.

IBM has produced a 19-minute webinar about the app, featuring comments from Barbie Robinson, director of the county’s Department of Health Services, and Carolyn Staats, the county’s director of innovation. The county is set to pay $160,000 to IBM for development of the app, a county spokesman said.

“A major component of this is relying on employees to perform self-assessments of their well-being on a daily basis, and sharing that information with their employer in order to make sure that if they are not well, if they are exhibiting symptoms that are characterized by the coronavirus, that they’re staying home or staying out of contact with others to prevent the spread of the disease,” Robinson said in the webinar. “It’s not just a matter of revitalizing the economy or opening the economy. We want the community to have a level of confidence and feel safe that businesses are mitigating to the best of their ability to protect their health.”

Slides shown during the IBM presentation include prompts for employees to verify that they do not have a fever, check for other COVID-19 symptoms and say whether they’ve been in contact with someone who has COVID-19. However, the app will not be used for contact tracing, a county spokesman said in an email.

Data collected by the app in the form of an anonymous personal response will be available to Sonoma County and stored on IBM’s secure public cloud for businesses, IBM spokeswoman Carrie Bendzsa said, adding that “no personal information is ever shared and individual users are never identified.”

“This is data that belongs entirely to the client (Sonoma County) and not to IBM,” Bendzsa said in an email. “While it is hosted on the IBM public cloud, IBM access and use of data will only be directed by Sonoma County for Sonoma’s purposes. Sonoma can access this data 24/7.”

When asked Friday at a press conference about the county’s use of the data, Mase began to answer before a county spokesman cut her off.

“The objective of the county in collecting data on its aggregate population is to gather information to monitor community health relative to COVID-19,” spokesman Rohish Lal said later in an email, adding that the data will be held for 45 days and then deleted. “We liked the aspect of data being deleted to give citizens peace of mind their information wasn’t being collected for good, so we adopted it for the app.”

Lal cited a recommendation by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, regarding data deletion protocols. (The think tank also recommends that “the entity that hosts the data must be a trusted nonprofit organization - not private technology companies or the federal government.”)

Staats, the county’s director of innovation, noted in the IBM presentation the app would include a newsfeed that county health officials would be able to update regularly to keep up with a dynamic flow of information from federal, state and local officials.

Robinson, who was not available for an interview Friday, said in the webinar she was “really excited” about the opportunity to push out information through the Sonoma County app. “I think that the residents want as much information as possible,” she said.

The employer’s side of the app appears to consist of reviewing an employee’s responses to verify that they are healthy enough to work, according to the presentation. Data fields for employee temperature and use of facial covering also exist, Staats said in the webinar.

The county continues to recommend temperature screenings of workers by their employer and is considering whether to make that practice mandatory, Mase said Friday, adding that requiring employees to screen themselves could place a burden on workers who don’t own thermometers.

“It’s a pretty good metric, though, one of the only objective measures that we’d have for screening,” Mase said. “Everything else is subjective.”