Situation: As COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to grip the United States, Virginia Beach Psychiatric Center required a process to screen all staff, patients and visitors entering the hospital. The hospital needed an accurate screening solution to mitigate the spread of illness. The manual system implemented was not accurate and exposed both the staff member and visitor/patient to cross-contamination. The current manual system slowed shift changes which resulted in delays and created bottlenecks for law enforcement presenting involuntary patients on a Temporary Detainment Order. The overall environment caused stress and staffing became increasingly challenging.

Solution: The hospital leadership turned to DeCurtis Corporation and its health technology solution – DeCurtis Shield™. This solution cannot detect a virus, but thermal imaging cameras can be used as a tool to conduct non-touch screenings for elevated body temperature quickly and accurately.

Outcome: DeCurtis Shield™ quickly screened all individuals entering the building for elevated body temperature more accurately than the manual system they were using before. As of July 31, 2020, a total of 21,115 scans have been performed. Sixty individuals were turned away due to measuring an elevated body temperature. Two of these individuals later tested positive for COVID-19 and four individuals were later admitted to the ICU with serious illnesses, two not related to COVID-19. Shift change became seamless. The employee doing the manual checks was no longer stressed because they did not have to break the social distancing protocol to assess elevated body temperature. Staff called out less because they were now given hard data on the risk of exposure. Since no one who registered an elevated body temp during their shift could enter, they now had peace of mind when they went home that day, possible exposure to COVID-19 was significantly mitigated. The overall morale improved among the staff, and patients were identified accurately when additional testing was needed after registering an elevated body temperature. There have been no false-positive elevated temperatures as of June 12, 2020.