This is an overview of the formative evaluation conducted by MITRE of the federal government’s Operation Expanded Testing (OpET), which provided COVID-19 testing with the aim of helping schools and other congregate settings in some of the hardest hit areas of the country reopen and operate safely.
Reopening & Operating Safely: A Testing Program Model for Future Public Health Emergencies
The COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on the health and lives of millions of Americans. The OpET program, implemented through a unique partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense, provided a testing option that aimed to help schools and other congregate settings in some of the hardest hit areas of the country reopen and operate safely. The program ran from May 2021–December 2022. The MITRE-operated federally funded R&D center for health conducted a formative evaluation of the OpET program and found that while the program achieved some success, it also faced significant challenges to achieving its objectives. Both the successes and challenges offer lessons for future large-scale infectious disease testing programs in public health emergencies. Although the full evaluation report will remain an internal document for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this brief overview of the program and the evaluation highlights has been approved for public release. The evaluation findings reflect the voices of 44 key informants—including representatives of U.S. government agencies, each of the implementing vendors, and several sites. They also draw on program data about the 8.6 million tests OpET administered.
The content in this brief reflects work by the full MITRE OpET Evaluation Team: David Denton (Co-Investigator), Antonia Asher, Stacye Daise, Melody Fung, Simone Greenberg, Diane Hanf, Sana Nag, Etta Waugh, Eric Whitebay, and Beth Yost.