Mexico City Deploys Avaya Solution for COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Call center work is important to nearly every industry and service on earth. It supports emergency services and police, healthcare, insurance, retail and professional services. It’s also highly critical during public health emergencies, as many municipalities are discovering as they implement contact tracing during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the CDC, contact tracing is a practice used by health departments to prevent the spread of infectious disease. It involves identifying people who have an infectious disease (cases) and their contacts (people who may have been exposed) and working with them to interrupt disease transmission. For COVID-19, this includes asking cases to isolate and contacts to quarantine at home voluntarily. The process is highly communications-intensive and is usually facilitated through contact centers.

In Mexico, the government of Mexico City and its Digital Agency for Public Innovation have implemented a strategy they’re calling the “Detection, Protection and Safeguard program” to address COVID-19, featuring contact tracing solutions. To facilitate the program, the city has adopted Avaya’s (News - Alert) tracing, notification and monitoring system to help mitigate the impacts of the pandemic and enable the community of nine million people to recover and emerge effectively and safely. The initiative is supported by a Locatel contact center which has been optimized to scale quickly and address the communications requirements of this massive effort.

“We have been able to quickly implement this program with the help of Avaya, and have scaled to successfully address the significant requirements of a municipality as large and populous as Mexico City,” said José Antonio Peña Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation, during a recent press conference.

Locatel has added 1,500 additional staff including 130 medical doctors dedicated to the program. The doctors are conducting video calls, health monitoring, coordination across multiple healthcare providers and hospitals, and providing consultation services including support for people with underlying conditions that put them at higher risk.

“Contact tracing capabilities are being deployed by organizations around the world as part of the global effort to recover from the pandemic, and it has never been more important for healthcare and government agencies to communicate effectively with their citizens and each other,” said Galib Karim, Vice President of Latin America, Avaya. “Avaya is pleased to play such a key role in helping organizations such as Locatel and the Government of CDMX in the execution of their COVID-19 Detection, Protection and Safeguard Program.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle