BALTIMORE, MD. (May 20, 2020)
emocha will partner with the City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District to assist the City with its contact tracing initiative, which will identify and monitor individuals exposed to COVID-19. emocha’s platform and engagement team will be deployed to monitor COVID-19 symptoms and temperatures for a group of residents exposed to persons confirmed positive for the virus. emocha’s mobile application uses short, asynchronous virtual check-ins to identify, track, and manage symptoms. The contact tracing initiative is a key element to the City of San Antonio’s phased re-opening of businesses and return-to-work plan.
San Antonio Metro Health is ahead of the curve nationally in designing and implementing a high-volume contact tracing program, a core disease control and public health strategy recognized by the CDC as essential to stopping the chain of transmission of highly infectious disease. Cities and states around the country including San Francisco, Massachusetts, and New York are hiring thousands of contact tracers to identify, inform, and monitor individuals who were exposed to the virus.
“emocha has been monitoring patients with highly-infectious disease since 2014 and we understand the urgency of the situation. We are eager to help the public health experts in San Antonio by deploying emocha monitoring services to thousands of exposed persons,” says emocha CEO Sebastian Seiguer.
San Antonio has implemented a four-phase process of reopening the city’s economy: including emocha remote monitoring to better enable contact tracing. Effective contact tracing—the ability to identify and monitor contacts of those individuals diagnosed with the virus, and rapidly identify the next COVID-19 case—is a key progress indicator for the transition to the second phase of staged reopening. In an effort to scale up to the capacity, San Antonio Metro Health has developed a system with the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STARC) to identify COVID-19 cases daily, and partnered with emocha to support both symptom monitoring and contact tracing work.
emocha’s partnership with San Antonio Metro Health will provide monitoring & support for individuals who may experience symptoms, and ensure timely notification for medical evaluation and testing. Residents using the app will be able to contact both Metro Health and emocha engagement specialists through the mobile application for questions and support. Use of emocha’s mobile app for symptom monitoring and contact tracing will enable San Antonio staff to focus on the highest risk cases, increasing the city’s overall capacity. emocha is proud to partner with the City of San Antonio to help safeguard the health of city residents throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and as San Antonio goes back to work.
About emocha Mobile Health
emocha provides remote monitoring services for patients to monitor their health through virtual check-ins and scalable human engagement. Since 2015, a version of emocha has been used for monitoring public health outbreaks, including Ebola and COVID-19. The platform is additionally being used by public health departments, hospitals, health centers, and managed care organizations across the globe to radically improve medication adherence for patients with diabetes, tuberculosis, opioid use disorder, asthma, COPD, hepatitis C, and other chronic and infectious diseases, and to monitor COVID-19 symptoms for those at risk. Learn more at www.emocha.com.
Contact: Sarenka Smith | email: ssmith@emocha.com | phone: 443.525.0156
