Pandemic Reveals Public Health Data Infrastructure Shortcomings

摘要

The COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully obvious what most people in healthcare already suspected: underinvestment in public health data infrastructure had left the country unprepared to share data efficiently. How did we get here and what is to be done about it? During an April work group meeting of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Jim Jirjis, M.D., chief health information officer of the 185-hospital HCA Healthcare, said, "What is really coming out is the cost of not having the kind of interoperability capability we are all envisioning. What we are seeing is an accelerating number of not just states, but municipalities, regions and others that are asking for information through a variety of transport mechanisms, in a variety of data definitions, and it is just overwhelming our ability to respond, even though we want to and are willing," he said. "The real problem is not having standards in place to make it easy to comply."