Days after hospitals were told to stop sending information to CDC, all the fears appear justified
Until this week, hospitals across the nation sent their data each day to the National Healthcare Safety Network. There had been some complaints about this network—mostly that it was unforgiving when it came to the data format and didn’t provide flexibility for capturing additional information. But that information fed dashboards at the CDC, which provided information not just on the number of confirmed cases and deaths, but on the rates of hospitalization and number of available beds. On Thursday morning, that site temporarily vanished. Then it returned, featuring data from … last week.
The change in where and how hospitals report data, backed up by Donald Trump threatening to sending the National Guard in to make them “do it right,” means that the CDC is now bypassed. Instead, the data is now going into a new system from HHS. And what’s coming out is significantly less information. Just a couple of days into the new program, experts at both the state and national level are finding that the change is doing exactly what many feared—making it more difficult to track the threat of COVID-19.
As the Idaho Statesman reports, the switchover had an immediate effect on the ability of state officials to see what was going on in their own states, with the spokesperson for the Idaho Department of Health reporting “significant challenges” in their ability to monitor the number of hospitalizations. With the way information is now being routed, it’s not being congregated at the state level, or available on the public website of the CDC. It’s all going into HHS, directly from individual hospitals, and what comes out the other side is only what the White House chooses to make available.
Information provided to the National Healthcare Safety Network was displayed as soon as it was updated, in real time. This led to some errors being displayed to the public, as mistakes, or badly formatted submissions, could generate errors that were instantly visible. But the alternative system, which is managed by private healthcare firm TeleTracking, is already resulting in delays and a lack of information that state officials called stunning and disappointing.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/16/1961226/-Hospitals-are-still-sending-in-data-on-COVID-19-but-it-s-no-longer-visible-outside-the-White-House
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