contact tracing data held by private companies that offer cell phone contact tracing applications. This information on the Coronavirus pandemic is important for the public’s benefit to help manage surveil the spread of infectious diseases. It may also support Covid research and innovation too.
We aspire to use our collective population data to provide a more sustainable, efficient and effective care system—i.e., a learning health system.
Also barriers persist for patients to have their data with their care team, meanwhile for-profit companies share data amongst each other.
Access to privately held data is needed a timely manner, ideally without data sharing agreements which usually take too long to negotiate. Urgent and ongoing real-time access to this data, is required. The private sector has some incentive to assist (e.g., corporate goodwill), but they are under no obligations to do so, and there are costs to bare. Aside from industry contracts there currently aren’t any governing frameworks to make this process efficient.
What is contact tracing and how does it work? GPS or peer to peer? Who makes the applications? Who has evaluated the sufficiency of privacy in contact tracing? Is the data-deidentified? Is it geographically abstracted to a the postal forwarding service area (FSA)? What would be shared with public health and are there any ethical implications in the use of this Real World Evidence (RWE)? Is the data reliable or evidence grade?