Managing cases to follow up with potentially exposed contacts

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Managing cases to follow up with potentially exposed contacts

    This guide explains how ServiceNow’s Contact Tracing capabilities help case managers identify, notify, and follow up with employees potentially exposed to infectious diseases like COVID-19. It details the process from creating cases for affected employees to managing outreach and follow-up activities for exposed contacts, with automation and visualization support to streamline case handling and improve workplace safety.

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    Key Features

    • Case Creation and Confidentiality: Case managers create confidential cases when an employee tests positive to track potential exposures.
    • Diagnostic Requests: These requests identify on-site employees who might have been in contact with the affected employee using data sources such as workplace locations, shifts, meetings, badge swipes, and Wi-Fi access.
    • Automated Case Creation: Integration with the Emergency Self Report application allows automatic case creation when employees self-report quarantine status, avoiding duplicate cases.
    • Automated Case Task Management: Adding potentially exposed contacts to a case automatically creates case tasks assigned by default to the case manager, who can delegate follow-up to contact tracers.
    • SMS Outreach Notifications: When enabled with Virtual Agent and Twilio, exposed contacts receive automated SMS notifications to complete health surveys, improving timely communication.
    • Visualization Tools: Interactive graphical views let case managers analyze exposure sources, track case and task status, and filter data to prioritize investigations.
    • Safe Workplace Dashboard Integration: When installed, this dashboard provides trends and alerting for active cases and potentially exposed contacts by campus or location, supporting proactive workplace health monitoring.

    Key Customer Actions

    • Create a case for an affected employee to initiate contact tracing.
    • Run diagnostic requests to identify potentially exposed employees based on multiple workplace data sources.
    • Send outreach notifications to alert potentially exposed employees promptly.
    • Create and assign case tasks to follow up with exposed contacts using predefined surveys to assess health status.
    • Utilize automation features for efficient case and task creation and SMS survey delivery to streamline follow-up.
    • Leverage the visualization tools to monitor exposure networks and manage investigations effectively.
    • Use the Safe Workplace Dashboard to observe trends and configure alerts for case thresholds to maintain a safe workplace environment.

    Practical Benefits

    ServiceNow’s Contact Tracing capabilities enable organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential infectious disease exposures within the workplace. Automation reduces manual effort, while visualization and dashboards provide actionable insights to case managers and contact tracers. This leads to faster containment, improved employee safety, and compliance with health protocols, supporting business continuity during health crises.

    When an employee who returns to the workplace is classified as positive for a condition, such as COVID-19, the case manager creates a case to identify and follow up with potentially exposed contacts.

    Run the diagnostic request to identify potentially exposed contacts

    The diagnostic request helps you generate a report of all on-site employees who might have been in contact with an affected employee.

    If any employee is confirmed to be affected with an infectious disease, send the employee name to the case manager to create a case.
    Note:
    To protect the privacy of the affected employee, you can mark a case as confidential.

    Case management process

    The case manager sets up a case for an employee who might have been exposed to any infectious disease.
    1. Create a case for an affected employee.
    2. Run a diagnostic request to identify all potentially exposed contacts through various tracing systems such as workplace location, workplace shifts and reservations, meetings, employee badge swipe data, and Wi-Fi access data. For more information, see Identify potentially exposed users.
    3. Send an outreach notification to potentially exposed contacts to notify them of a potential exposure from an affected employee.
    4. Create case tasks to follow up with these potentially exposed contacts to assess their health status using predefined survey questions.

    Automated case creation

    You must have the Emergency Self Report application installed for the automatic case creation to work. For more information, see Set up Emergency Self Report.

    If an employee is reported as being in quarantine through the self-reporting option in the Emergency Self Report application, a case is created automatically for the employee. The case is created automatically only if the employee doesn't have any active case at the time of self-reporting.

    If the employee has an active case, a work note is added to the case for the case manager to take appropriate action, if needed.

    The Automated Case Creation from Employee Self Report flow is installed with Contact Tracing. The contact tracing admin can review and configure the base system flow using the Flow Designer.

    Automated case task creation on adding a potentially exposed contact

    When a case manager adds a potentially exposed contact to a case, a case task is created automatically. By default, these case tasks are assigned to the case manager, and the case manager can assign it to a contact tracer to follow up with the employee.
    Note:
    Case task creation occurs automatically only if the sn_imt_tracing.auto_create_case_tasks property is set to Yes, the default setting.

    The Create case tasks for exposed contacts workflow is installed with Contact Tracing. The contact tracing admin can review and modify the base system flow using the Flow Designer.

    Automated SMS outreach delivery to potentially exposed contacts

    To take advantage of automatic SMS outreach delivery, you must have Virtual Agent installed and set up for use with SMS and Twilio. For more information on this feature, see Virtual Agent conversations for Contact Tracing.

    When a user is added to a case task as a potentially exposed contact, they are automatically sent an SMS notification to answer questions for the Exposure Case Task Survey.
    Note:
    SMS notifications are sent automatically only if the sn_imt_tracing.enable_sms_exposure_survey is set to Yes. When disabled (the default setting), you can send an SMS survey while working on a case task by clicking the Send SMS Survey button.

    Potentially exposed contacts visualization

    Contact Tracing provides interactive visualization to view the potentially exposed contacts in a case. The visualization enables case managers to quickly evaluate the contact tracing data on a single page. The potentially exposed contacts visualization includes the following options:
    • View potentially exposed contacts with the source of exposure graphically
    • Drill down to the next level of exposures to quickly identify the severity of the exposure from the affected employee
    • Create and view cases and tasks for potentially exposed contacts
    • Change the status of the investigation of potentially exposed contacts
    • Filter the view by status or source of exposure, or both

    View case metrics in ServiceNow Safe Workplace Dashboard

    If you have the Safe Workplace Dashboard application installed, you can view the trends of the following data over a given time period for a campus or location:
    • Number of active cases
    • Number of potentially exposed contacts
    For more information, see Safe Workplace Dashboard.

    You can also configure the alert type to determine when the number of active cases is above the threshold in a particular campus or location. For more information, see Alert types used with the Safe Workplace Dashboard.