“Among the things that Dr. Walensky shared in her letter are five major commitments that push us to work more collaboratively by moving from a mindset shift from ‘my data’ to ‘our data’,” he said. E-Mail.
The email is the first formal indication that the CDC is taking new steps to address the data gaps that have hampered the agency’s Covid-19 response. And there are calls from lawmakers and public health officials that the agency is finding ways to ensure more accurate data to respond to the next pandemic – information that can easily be shared between hospitals, state health departments and the federal government.
In an interview with POLITICO before the email was sent, Jernigan said the modernization effort includes the unification of public health data systems at the state and federal levels, to ensure that the CDC relies on up-to-date and real-time information can be used. , and helps states hire employees to work on data collection and analysis.
In the last two years, the CDC has struggled to keep up with the rapid spread of the virus mainly due to the country’s ancient and aggregated public health data infrastructure. The agency relies on states to collect data from lab reports and hospital records, which are then submitted to the CDC. But state health departments have been underfunded and the methods they use to study disease outbreaks like Covid-19 are uneven and outdated.
States rely on various sources to collect public health data, including through contact tracing, lab reports and individual reporting. Some still depend on laboratories to fax results, others work with systems in which duplicate positive entries cannot be eliminated.
“The data problems are real,” former CDC director Jeffrey Koplan said Wednesday during a panel hosted by Yale University. “It is really inconceivable that we will not be able to get joint measures from state to state to federal. This undermines what we are trying to do and that needs to be corrected.
The CDC is working on solutions designed to help states gain better access to all the information they need more quickly and holistically.
Jernigan compared the way local health departments eventually gain access to data on Travelocity, a system that not only allows users to book a flight, but is able to pull information from various sources to make a car rental, hotel and things to do to propose to you. Destination.
A similar, cloud-based framework for public health information could one day allow local health professionals to quickly analyze data and understand what is happening in their communities instead of trying to plug data into old systems.
“You can now say, ‘I see that you have the person who was positive and died, and they actually live in an area with a high social vulnerability index, and they are in an area that is served by a federally qualified person’s. Health centers and we have some public health money, “Jernigan said.” You can now have that data, and the data will work for you, rather than what happened, what people have to work to get the data. People spent 80 percent of their time gathering information, faxing and putting it into one of their systems.
The CDC and public health officials across the country have pushed Congress fir more Money for data modernization. While lawmakers approved funding to improve CDC data methods, it was not enough to change how the agency collects and analyzes data in public health emergencies, dozens of government officials told POLITICO.
In the wake of the pandemic, the Trump administration tried to adjust the federal government’s public health data capabilities to close some long-standing gaps. The White House has tipped the Department of Health and Human Services to take over part of the U.S. Covid-19 data collection. Department officials created HHS Protect – a system that asked hospitals to provide information about TeleTracking, a private contractor, rather than through the CDC. The system is intended to give U.S. officials a greater view of how infectious diseases such as Covid-19 hospital resources are. The CDC recently took over the project as part of its push to improve data collection and analysis.
To better understand how Omicron and its subvariant transmission and severe disease affect it, the CDC re-evaluates Covid-19 hospitalizations to determine how many people search for the virus and how many tested positive upon arrival.
Jernigan said the CDC is devoting $ 3 billion to state public health departments to help recruit new staff and train existing ones who can improve the way local data systems work. State health officials in Louisiana have hired more staff to work on the state electronic lab reporting program to ensure that the test results that flow into the state health office are done through computers, rather than faxes or emails, and that the results are accurate. .
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