BCBS MA Deploys Employees for Contact Tracing, Staffing Support

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (Blue Cross) is deploying its employees to support statewide efforts against the coronavirus by helping in contact tracing and working at Boston Hope, the state capital’s field hospital.

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“These two public health efforts are crucial to stemming the spread of the virus and saving lives,” said Andrew Dreyfus, president and chief executive officer of Blue Cross. “As a locally based not-for-profit health plan, we have a significant role to play in supporting the community through this crisis. We’re proud to lend our greatest resource—our talented and compassionate employees—to the collaborative and to support patients at Boston Hope.”

Blue Cross will be sending over 100 employees to help with contact tracing. These employees will be working on behalf of Massachusetts’s Community Tracing Collaborative, which aims to hire 1,000 workers at a minimum to support the effort.

Along with other contact tracing workers, Blue Cross employees will be calling coronavirus patients to discern where they may have spread the virus before testing positive and assess any needs they may have during quarantine.

The Massachusetts Community Tracing Collaborative in which Blue Cross is participating models itself after the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security’s recommendations.

Contact tracing has been successfully employed by other nations to detect the potential spread of the novel coronavirus and provide support to those infected during quarantine. The Johns Hopkins report recommends up to 100,000 workers be dedicated to this task in the country’s most high risk areas and estimates that the project would cost $3.6 billion.

Blue Cross will also be addressing the staffing shortages for coronavirus patients.

A total of 15 nurses have been assigned to the Boston Hope field hospital to provide support to the discharged patients, seven days a week and 12 hours a day. Their job entails looking after both the medical and major social determinants of health needs of discharged, low acuity patients.

An additional seven clinicians operate a mental and behavioral healthcare helpline for discharged patients, a strategy which has become common among some private payers as well for providing access to care.

Field hospitals have been popping up in coronavirus epicenters across the nation. The Boston Hope field hospital is a site of care specifically designed for low acuity, COVID-19 patients. It also serves as temporary housing for homeless persons in the Boston area.

Partners HealthCare and Boston Health Care for the Homeless are largely responsible for staffing the care site. They partnered with local and state governments for the site’s construction at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

These reinforcements are sorely needed as coronavirus overwhelms and depletes the nation’s hospitals and provider networks of healthcare professionals, through sickness and death.

In early April 2020, US News reported that 4.4 percent of Pennsylvania’s coronavirus victims were healthcare workers, while in Ohio the percentage is thought to be as high as 20 percent. But the national total cannot be estimated with certainty because not all states are gathering data on healthcare professionals’ coronavirus-related deaths.

Additionally, Blue Cross funding will help vulnerable populations access food. In partnership with the food service vendor Flik, the payer will deliver 5,000 meals per week to nonprofits and, using Blue Cross facility cafeterias, will prepare another 1,000 boxes for distribution.

Lastly, the payer is hosting a public blood drive with the American Red Cross this spring.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is not the only payer in Massachusetts partaking in this effort.

The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority (CCA), a state program that connects those ineligible for Medicaid with affordable healthcare coverage, will also be engaged in the contact tracing, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker announced in a coronavirus update. CCA is responsible for setting up a virtual center and supporting continuous connectivity.

“Enhanced contact tracing capability is another powerful tool for public health officials and health care providers in the battle against COVID-19,” said Governor Baker in the announcement. “Massachusetts is the only state in the nation implementing this type of programming, and this collaborative tracing initiative will break new ground as we work together to slow the spread of COVID-19.”