ICYMI: The state has paid $33.2 million to TestUtah since September — the same month it began keeping a log of complaints about the mass testing sites.
At one TestUtah site in January, an inspector saw a “pile” of processed rapid tests ignored for an hour and a half, even though results are only valid for a 5-minute window.
In an interview Wednesday about complaints investigated by the Utah Department of Health, Nomi Health co-founder and chief operating officer Josh Walker said many of the state’s recent complaints were “hearsay or anecdotal” and difficult to run down. “It was determined that the deficient practices of your laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety,” inspectors with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote.
Thursday was the final day for residents to be tested at TestUtah under state contracts, though some sites are scheduled to remain open for testing for private insurance companies. The state’s complaint logs, obtained by The Tribune, show patients, site employees and health officials have been raising concerns about TestUtah for months, while the state poured millions into its contracts with Orem-based Nomi Health.
One of TestUtah’s site supervisors was so alarmed by what she witnessed at work that she was willing to step forward as a whistleblower, and submitted a 20-page report of concerns to the Utah Department of Health in early February. But some of the new employees seemed to misunderstand even basic details of testing, according to a complaint dated “Sept.-Ongoing.”
“I’m not thrilled that their staff is apparently recommending symptomatic people without vehicles would expose some poor cab driver rather than just let them come on foot,” the complaint states. In mid-October, a UDOH staffer wrote: “We’ve tried to email anyone at Nomi multiple times over the last week without one response. Any other suggestions please?”
In mid-November, local health departments reported that they “frequently hear about missing test results from TestUtah sites in Davis County and Southwest [Utah],” the log states. UDOH staff wrote that they had contacted Nomi twice in late October and early November about the data problems, but received “no response.”
Walker said those concerns are the product of a misunderstanding and that the QR codes are only used to register for tests and not to share results, which are sent to patients in the form of a secure link. In response, Walker said each staffer has an individual account and that the TestUtah system automatically logged a person off after a certain period of inactivity.
“The person doing the testing at Nomi Health barely put the thing in her nose and took it back out,” one mother wrote after her daughter tested negative at the Roy test site but positive at a community clinic. “I think they need to be investigated. Getting false negatives because they don’t do the test right is very dangerous and likely contributing to the spread of the virus.
UDOH also reported that staff were not changing gloves between patients. Not only that, staffers from the state-run mobile teams who volunteered at TestUtah sites to help manage crowds told UDOH “that they were told specifically NOT to swap out gloves in between testing individuals in the same vehicle.”As the omicron variant swept through Utah in late December and early January, UDOH increasingly reported problems with test timing.
In fact, the instructions for the test require the user to read the results 15 to 20 minutes after processing begins. “This has been brought up multiple times. Nomi has said they track time based on clocks on iPads,” the log states — but Nomi ultimately “purchased some timers.” “This is a possible patient test contamination,” a collection worker acknowledged in an interview with the inspector.
“She had never been on the site, so I explained everything in like two minutes, and the poor girl was shaking,” she said. “I’m like, just get out there, just get a car, it’s fine.” Walker acknowledged that Nomi monitored the pace of work at its sites and believed that testing each patient should only take a “few minutes” under normal circumstances. “We believe that tracking those types of metrics is not unusual in organizations where operational excellence is top of mind,” he said.
Frustrated with her supervisor’s lack of response to her concerns, she said, she shared her worries with a health department employee who showed up at her site. At the official’s suggestion, she wrote the report formally outlining the issues for UDOH, she said. . Of the people whose PCR results came back positive for COVID-19, more than half had a negative rapid test result.
“I could see it possibly being Nomi total incompetency,” Dr. Leisha Nolen, state epidemiologist, wrote in a message to colleagues.
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