Management of Pandemic Case Investigation and Contact Tracing

Published March 3, 2022

The County has been providing resources for pandemic case investigation and contact tracing. The focus of the audit is management of staffing for case investigation (CI) and contact tracing (CT). Important tools for fighting the current COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the staffing is with temporary staff hired through a staffing company.

What was found:

The audit report presented some valuable information on benchmarking of cases. Deschutes County during surges appears to sustain a higher level of cases than their peers.

Deschutes has done a much better job of addressing their workload in a timely manner as evidenced in trends in percent of Covid-19 cases with follow-up initiated within 24 hours.

Trends in CI/CT costs and pandemic cases tend to move together indicating that utilization moving with the influx of cases. It was observed that additional management of temporary labor vendor contract was needed. It was also noted that additional job performance input could be provided to longer duration contracted temporary staff.

A number of metrics for case investigation and contact tracing were calculated and presented over a period of time in comparison to case activity to show how these metrics might provide insights into performance and outcomes of the work.

These metrics when developed at the staff level (and compared across staff over time) can be useful for oversight and training purposes.

A survey of the 29 CI/CT temporary contract staff was overall very positive towards the process of working with Health Services.

What was recommended:

Recommendations included:

• developing a new invitation to bid for temporary labor;
• establishing more effective leadership and management of the temporary labor contracts and how they are used
• considering what practices should be employed to provide feedback to contracted temporary staff; and
• using more metrics to manage temporary and remote staffing workloads.

Recommendation update:

At the 2025 Global update, limited Human Resources staffing has delayed implementation of these recommendations. The Behavioral Health Department deferred responsibility for implementing the recommendation about using metrics to manage temporary staff to Human Resources. Using metrics to evaluate staff performance and workload increases efficiency and effectiveness of County programs.