By Jon King / jking@whmi.com


Following allegations by a Livingston County Commissioner that confidential personal medical information was being collected for partisan political purposes; the state of Michigan announced it will choose a different software platform to manage thousands of data points related to Michigan's coronavirus contact tracing project.

The change follows criticism from several Republicans, including Livingston County Commissioner Wes Nakagiri, that the software company EveryAction VAN, which was chosen to manage the data, has connections to dozens of Democratic candidates, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Contact tracing is the process of identifying people who may have come into contact with an infected person and then collecting further information about those contacts. By tracing the contacts of infected individuals, testing them for infection and tracing their contacts in turn, public health officials aim to reduce infections in the population.

EveryAction was contracted through Great Lakes Community Engagement, which specializes in outreach campaigns. On Tuesday, Whitmer spokeswoman Tiffany Brown told The Detroit News that the contract with Great Lakes Community Engagement should have been approved by the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC), but was not. But the paper noted that it was unclear why the SEOC would have issued the press release announcing the contract if it hadn't approved the agreement. State business records also indicate that Great Lakes Community Engagement is connected to Grand Rapids-based K2K Consulting and Kolehouse Strategies, both of which are operated by Democratic consultant Mike Kolehouse.

Nakagiri says all of this “raises more questions regarding the Whitmer Administration’s volunteer contact tracing program” and questioned “Why did the Whitmer Administration bother to issue the April 20 press release referring to one of their vendors as Great Lakes Community Engagement, when previously released training documents referred to the vendor as Kolehouse Strategies? The Whitmer Administration is still attempting to obfuscate the fact that they selected a partisan Democrat firm to handle confidential health information. Both of these are just front companies for K2K Consulting.” Laura Cox, chairwoman for the Michigan Republican Party, has also called out the contract, saying it was “deeply troubling” the personal data could possibly be utilized for partisan ends.

Max Kamin-Cross, a spokesman for EveryAction, told WHMI that they “were not involved in the state’s selection of Kolehouse Strategies and have no visibility into that aspect of the contracting process” adding that he could not imagine a situation where this data “would be useful for partisan gain, but given that we are a software company (not a data company) we wouldn’t have played a role in that - clients like this have full ownership of their own data as per section 7.1 of our Terms of Service.” Kamin Cross said it was also “worth noting that (there) are quite a few partisan firms on the right (included data brokers such as i360) actively courting coronavirus related government business, who could actually be in a position to use any potential data for partisan gain."

Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, previously told WHMI that they have, “strict policies in place to prohibit the sharing of any protected health information.” MDHHS Spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin added that the department’s “overwhelming consideration was in finding an off-the-shelf software product that could do exactly what we needed it to do for this project, given the immediate public health crisis the state is facing and the need for an unprecedented mass citizen outreach effort by the state government.”