The state is investing nearly $28 million into two projects to
help counties with contact tracing efforts, including $8.7
million to operationalize an online training program for up to
20,000 new contact tracers and $18.7 million for a data
management system to support that new contact tracing workforce.
The California Department of Finance notified the Legislature on
the expected expenditures on May 8 as required by SB 89 (Chapter
2, Statutes of 2020).
The $8.7 million will be paid to the Universities of California
San Francisco and Los Angeles to create an online training
academy on the principles of epidemiology, contact tracing, and
infectious disease training strategies. The training program will
also include live sessions and will take approximately 20 hours
over five days. Once completed, this trained workforce will be
available to county public health departments at no charge to a
requesting county.
The $18.7 million will flow through the California Department of
Public Health to develop a new data management platform with
Accenture, Salesforce, and Amazon to support the new contact
tracing workforce. The new system will operate alongside the
state’s existing disease surveillance system and is modeled on a
large-scale online and call center-based contact tracing system
in Massachusetts. Again, the new platform will be available to
all local public health departments at no cost.
View the DoF letter to the Legislature here.
