Problems in communicating and sharing data blunts U.S. response to outbreaks

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Wed, 2022-09-21 09:44 — mike kraft

'Very Harmful' Lack of Data Blunts U.S. Response to Outbreaks ANCHORAGE, Alaska — After a middle-aged woman tested positive for COVID-19 in January at her workplace in Fairbanks, public health workers sought answers to questions vital to understanding how the virus was spreading in Alaska’s rugged interior. The woman, they learned, had existing conditions and had not been vaccinated. She had been hospitalized but had recovered. Alaska and many other states have routinely collected that kind of information about people who test positive for the virus. Part YahooNews

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The woman, they learned, had existing conditions and had not been vaccinated. She had been hospitalized but had recovered. Alaska and many other states have routinely collected that kind of information about people who test positive for the virus. Part of the goal is to paint a detailed picture of how one of the worst scourges in American history evolves and continues to kill hundreds of people daily, despite determined efforts to stop it.

But most of the information about the Fairbanks woman — and tens of millions more infected Americans — remains effectively lost to state and federal public health researchers. Decades of underinvestment in public health information systems has crippled efforts to understand the pandemic, stranding crucial data in incompatible data systems so outmoded that information often must be repeatedly typed in by hand.

Those same antiquated data systems are now hampering the response to the monkeypox outbreak. Once again, state and federal officials are losing time trying to retrieve information from a digital pipeline riddled with huge holes and obstacles.

The federal government invested heavily over the past decade to modernize the data systems of private hospitals and health care providers, doling out more than $38 billion in incentives to shift to electronic health records. That has enabled doctors and health care systems to share information about patients much more efficiently.

But while the private sector was modernizing its data operations, state and local health departments were largely left with the same fax machines, spreadsheets, emails and phone calls to communicate.

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