After contact tracing data breach, Pa avoids review of proposed $34 million contract Spotlight PA

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HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania Department of Health is scrambling to hire a new company under an even more expensive contract to resume its contact tracing program after it fired the previous company in May for a massive violation of data that was still not secure in June and led to a federal lawsuit.

On June 23, the state’s Department of General Services approved the health department’s request for a one-year, $34 million contract with Boston-based Public Consulting Group, LLC through an emergency supply – a system that allows state agencies to circumvent typical tendering practices to obtain supplies or services quickly in an emergency.

During the pandemic, the health department has used the process to purchase everything from flu shots to supplies like pipette tips to perform COVID-19 lab tests, as well as enter into consultancy contracts to advise on the deployment of the coronavirus vaccine.

It was also used last July to hire Insight Global, the Atlanta-based company recently fired by the health department for failing to secure personal information collected when staff contacted people potentially exposed to the virus. This contract was initially estimated at $25 million.

The contract with Public Consulting Group, LLC had not been finalized on Thursday.

Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R., York) criticized the department’s lack of transparency in pursuing the new hire and questioned why the department didn’t first answer questions about the Insight breach Overall.

“I strongly believe that instead of repeating the mistakes of the past – entering into an emergency contract with an out-of-state supplier – it would be prudent to put the brakes on, and I think the Department of Health must do so. Household chores. with the people of Pennsylvania,” said Phillips-Hill, chairman of the Senate Communications and Technology Committee.

The department selected Public Consulting Group, says the request for emergency supply, because of the company’s track record of contact tracing in neighboring states and because it is already registered in supply programs of the State which accelerate hiring.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the health department made the same argument used in the department’s emergency supply request.

“To avoid a disruption to this essential public health service, it is imperative to bring in a new provider immediately,” the spokesperson said. “The work performed under this contract will have a direct impact on the number of COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania.”

When asked if using the standard contracting process might have helped prevent the issues the department was having with Insight Global, a spokesperson said that all of the health department’s contracts, “whatever regardless of the procurement process, contain strict provisions for the security and confidentiality of information”.

“The department continues to work with all current and future vendors to ensure that all privacy and security protocols are strictly adhered to,” the statement said.

Public Consulting Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Pennsylvania, like many other states, had to rapidly ramp up contact tracing early in the pandemic. In June 2020, public health experts estimated the state needed 2,000 to 4,000 contact tracers.

Although state and local health departments have staff available to do this type of work – nationwide agencies routinely use contact tracing to contain small, localized outbreaks of diseases like Ebola, HIV, or mumps and measles — they didn’t have the resources to deal with COVID-19, which spread quickly and easily, said Chrysan Cronin, director and professor of public health at Muhlenberg College.

Last year, when the state was still reeling from the first four months of the pandemic and preparing for an anticipated spike in cases, it made sense to outsource the work, Cronin said.

As Spotlight PA reported last spring, Pennsylvania had for several decades reduced the number of public health nurses it employed to conduct contact tracing until there was only one left. skeletal workforce. The state Department of Health employed just 131 people in this role as of April 2020, down from 177 nurses in 2012.

The department hired Insight Global in July to recruit and train 1,000 contact tracing staff.

“This project will strengthen and diversify our public health workforce while coordinating and mobilizing efforts to defeat any potential surge in COVID-19 cases,” former Health Secretary Rachel Levine said in a statement to the era.

But at the end of April this year, the health department and Insight Global acknowledged that the names, dates of birth, counties of residence and personal health details of as many as 72,000 people interviewed during the contact tracing process had been exposed online. The information was stored in Google Drive documents used by Insight Global employees, but was visible to anyone with a link.

The Phillips-Hill committee held a hearing on May 11 to investigate the violation. Health Department officials were scheduled to attend, but canceled after an Allegheny County woman affected by the violation filed a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that the health department and Insight Global knew about the security breach for months but did nothing to stop it.

Then in June, despite promises that all data had been secured, Spotlight PA reported that a Google document identifying 66 people – many of them minors – was still online. Two days later, an attorney from Insight Global enlisted current and former employees to help locate and secure documents.

Phillips-Hill asked on Monday how Public Consulting Group would collect and secure the data. She also wanted to know how the health department justified a one-year contract as COVID-19 cases continued to decline.

When asked in June what the department was learning about the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing, officials said the program was “less about collecting data and more about slowing the spread of a virus by asking residents who have been exposed to isolate or quarantine themselves from others based on their level of exposure.

They estimated that for every person contacted, 2-10 additional cases are prevented, but did not provide supporting data.

According to the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator built by the George Washington Institute for Health Workforce Equity — which factors in factors like 14-day case counts — Pennsylvania still needs 1,954 contact tracers.

About 1,200 contact tracers, some employed by Insight Global, were working statewide through mid-June, according to a state health department report released June 16.

The contract with Insight Global ended on June 18. Health Department officials said case investigations will be handled by 140 community health nurses and 50 National Guard members through mid-July as the state transitions to a new program to find the contacts.

The future of the program

Health Department officials declined to answer Spotlight PA’s questions about how many people will be hired by the new contact tracing provider and what factors related to the future of the pandemic were considered. when the department made the emergency supply request.

Even as the state relaxes mitigation protocols like masking requirements — which were lifted statewide on June 28 — there are no plans to end the contact tracing program until cases of COVID-19 are being reported in Pennsylvania, health officials told Spotlight PA in June.

As of Thursday, only one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties had seen an increase in cases over the past two weeks, according to state data compiled by Spotlight PA. There have been a total of 1.2 million cases of COVID-19 in the state since March 2020.

Cronin, the Muhlenberg professor of public health, questioned whether Pennsylvania has enough data to determine whether the contact tracing program in its current form is still needed.

“It’s a lot of money when you’re not sure you’ve made a difference,” Cronin said of the new contract cost estimate.

Keeping a contact tracing program in place could help manage spikes in COVID-19 cases as mitigation measures lift, said Catherine Haggerty, an epidemiologist at the University’s Graduate School of Public Health. ‘University of Pittsburgh.

It could also help monitor outbreaks in vulnerable groups and those not eligible for vaccination, such as children under 12.

“Vaccination rates, while they’re up and things look encouraging, they’re certainly not 100%,” Haggerty said. “Containment efforts that include quarantining close contacts, isolating cases continue to be critically important. Now is not the time to let our guard down.

Pennsylvania is not the only state to continue contact tracing, even as cases decline and vaccination rates rise, according to a nationwide survey of state health departments conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and NPR in May.

Of the 36 states that responded, 29 said contact tracing would continue at existing levels and receive similar resources, according to survey results, while only four states – Arizona, California, Maine and Oregon — said they plan to hire more contact tracers.

Six others said contact tracing would “continue, but be deprioritized”.

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