Covid-19 Testing: How will patients get results?

As of the beginning of December, there have been over 14 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States and over 280,000 deaths, which is the highest in the world.

This unprecedented, massive public health crisis will require extensive planning and resources to address. Although there has been recent positive news about multiple potential coronavirus vaccines hitting the market soon, COVID-19 testing will be a major part of getting back to normal for a long time to come.

The Biden administration’s COVID-19 testing plan

A focused and robust national response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a central promise of Joe Biden’s campaign for the White House.

To that end, the Biden administration’s plan to beat COVID-19 involves ensuring all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free testing. This means doubling the number of drive-through testing sites and investing in next-generation testing so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.

These tests are not only valuable for people with symptoms. Due to the significance of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, the CDC’s guidance on COVID-19 testing stresses the need to conduct asymptomatic surveillance testing to monitor COVID-19 transmission, investigate and understand disease severity, and keep people safe by controlling asymptomatic community spread.

Biden’s strategy is to provide a centralized approach to coronavirus testing. To carry out this plan, he calls for establishing a Pandemic Testing Board, similar to Roosevelt’s War Production Board. This is how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time, and now Biden plans to use a similar strategy to produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.

Distributing test results

These millions of COVID-19 tests will require an efficient method to transmit the results in a HIPAA compliant manner to patients.

However, with Americans receiving an average of 2,000 robocalls per second, healthcare organizations face strong headwinds around secure patient outreach.

A good alternative to phone calls is HIPAA compliant email. However, the problem with many forms of electronic healthcare communication is that they require patients to download an app or log into a secure portal to read a message. Adding unnecessary steps to read messages increases friction and decreases the open rate

Therefore, it behooves COVID-19 test providers to choose an email delivery method that allows them to transmit results at scale without any added friction. A HIPAA compliant email API could be an excellent option, especially since it enables thousands of test results to be sent at once.