In 2006, Congress ordered HHS to integrate health-data systems; it still hasn’t been done, and that causes problems
“The pandemic highlighted ineffective data infrastructure across the U.S. health system,” reports Sam Whitehead of Kaiser Health News. “Coronavirus case reports sent by fax machine. Clunky tech for monitoring vaccine distribution. . . . Supply chain breakdowns that left health-care providers without needed protective equipment. . . . And Congress knew about the potential for these problems long before Covid. Lawmakers mandated the Department of Health and Human Services to better integrate U.S. data management systems to allow stakeholders to better share information years ago, in 2006.”
Soumi Saha, senior vice president of government affairs at Premier, a health-technology company, told Whitehead, “What keeps me up at night is that we forget about the past two and a half years, and we just move on — that we don’t take the opportunity and time to truly reflect and make needed changes.”
Whitehead reports: “Different hospitals often use different electronic health-record systems, so are frequently unable to share patient data with one another, much less with the federal government. . . . Much of the 2019 bill mandating the data-sharing network’s creation is set to expire in September, and reauthorizing the law could be a challenge in a split Congress where House Republicans have announced their intention to examine the U.S. response to the pandemic.”
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Whitehead, “Congress has an opportunity now to build the public health system. What are they doing? Undermining public health legal authorities, demonizing public health officials. It’s almost like we didn’t learn anything.”