Posted on 05/13/2020 1:18:20 PM PDT by Olog-hai
On April 1, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emailed Nevada public health counterparts for lab reports on two travelers who had tested positive for the coronavirus. She asked Nevada to send those records via a secure network or a “password protected encrypted file” to protect the travelers’ privacy.
The Nevada response: Can we just fax them over?
You’d hardly know the U.S. invented the internet by the way its public health workers are collecting vital pandemic data. While health-care industry record-keeping is now mostly electronic, cash-strapped state and local health departments still rely heavily on faxes, email and spreadsheets to gather infectious disease data and share it with federal authorities.
This data dysfunction is hamstringing the nation’s coronavirus response by, among other things, slowing the tracing of people potentially exposed to the virus. In response, the Trump administration set up a parallel reporting system run by the Silicon Valley data-wrangling firm Palantir. Duplicating many data requests, it has placed new burdens on front-line workers at hospitals, labs and other health care centers who already report case and testing data to public health agencies.
There’s little evidence so far that the Palantir system has measurably improved federal or state response to COVID-19.
Emails exchanged between the CDC and Nevada officials in March and early April, obtained by The Associated Press in a public records request, illustrate the scope of the problem. It sometimes takes multiple days to track down such basic information as patient addresses and phone numbers. One disease detective consults Google to fill a gap. Data vital to case investigations such as patient travel and medical histories is missing. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Sounds like patient privacy under HIPAA is what is really getting in the way of the public health response, not the old technologies.
The hell it is. Problem here is departments not knowing how to talk to each other and crappy data handling. Fax and email are plenty fast, when used by people who actually know their job.
Getting the government as f@r away as possible from medicine would improve things drastically.
The truth is that state and county governments are full of incompetent nepotism hires. It is also full of over educated morons that can’t find their ass with both hands and another bunch that got government jobs they have no interest in because it is a guaranteed paycheck, insurance and pension and you don’t really have to work too hard nor is any really creative problems solving required.
It’s not like they will get fired for being useless sucks like they would in the private sector. They always blame the computer system for their failures.
No that doesn’t sound like the problem, gathering the data such as home address and phone numbers is the problem. They are using old systems that can’t populate the data from a centralized database sounds like to me.
Let’s also not forget that the CDC and their state and county public health counterparts have blown their budgets year after on gun control, sex ed, LGBTQXYZ and whatever else trendy social issue caught their squirrel like attention span. Not to mention new office furniture, team trainings in exotic locations and the daily muffin and coffee run.
It’s not exactly like that.
There were plenty of budget meetings where the Emergency Management expenses were dismissed: When was the last time there was a ( pandemic, asteroid hit, earthquake, etc.)
And that money was moved over to the Parks department to give some idiot kid a job.
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