Birx Stokes expects major hospital data tracking to return to CDC soon

According to Deborah Barks of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control will “build a groundbreaking new data system” for COVID-19 hospital data collection and ensure that the CDC runs on completion. It is working.

This week’s comment from Birx orders the Trump administration to evade hospitals and send important information about COVID-19 hospitalizations and equipment to another federal database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC. It was one month later.

The decision in July Avalanche of criticism From medical institutions and public health organizations. Weeks after the new reporting system was released The data was shown to be full of inconsistencies and was updated occasionally.

The announcement raised hope among some public health advocates that the current controversial system of reporting hospital data on COVID-19 will soon be canceled and data collection restored to the CDC.

Birx Remarks Monday During the visit to the Governor’s Mansion in Arkansas she did not provide a time frame for changes.

Having CDC perform data collection again, “is very helpful in getting us back on track in reporting, and understanding, what is happening in this pandemic across the region, state and country.” Dr. Vignette Chopra, Head of Hospital Medicine at the University of Michigan, Federal Advisory Board About nosocomial infection prevention

The White House last month instructed hospitals to stop reporting critical data to the CDC system they have been using since the beginning of the pandemic. Instead, the hospital should start reporting information about, for example, the number of intensive care beds available and how much personal protective equipment is in stock in the new system built by a private contractor. did not. TeleTracking, Or directly to the health departments of those states. Both tracks bypass the CDC and provide data directly to HHS.

As the number of infections in a state begins to increase, public health officials and residents worry about whether there are enough hospital beds for critically ill patients. Regional hospital capacity is an estimate and is based on data reported by individual hospitals. Public health authorities rely on estimates to see if a hospital is at risk of being overwhelmed.

Hospital was given Several days notice Adopt report changes. They were told that compliance with the new reporting tool would determine access to the federal supply of lemdesibir, one of the few drugs that has proven effective against COVID-19. ..

“Many hospitals, including us, have a hard time using new systems. We also understand the best way to extract data from it and use it to understand capacity and utilization. doing [for protective equipment], And the prevalence of infection. “

HHS officials claimed that the new system would provide faster and more complete data. But, NPR analysis presented A few weeks after the data collection has changed, the information posted on the public HHS site is uneven, incomplete, and full of errors.

Birx said Monday that he proved that the information collected through the HHS reporting system was useful. “Every day for the first time I can see all new hospital admissions across the country, and it was very important,” she said.

Still, she described the reporting system as “provisional.” “The final system is ready,” she said.[the data reporting function] You can revert to CDC and have regular accountability with hospitals related to treatment and PPE. “

The HHS said Birx’s comments did not constitute a policy shift. “The process of reporting COVID-19 data has not changed,” said Michael Caputo, Assistant Secretary of Public Relations at HHS, in an email to NPR.

The sharp changes in data collection last month broke the validity and accuracy of the data during a pandemic crisis, Lisa M. Lee, Former Chief of Science for Public Health Monitoring at the CDC, and now Vice President of Virginia Tech.

When the CDC takes over the data, “it will be a much better system in the long run,” she said.[because] There are CDC public surveillance scientists and public health professionals with the expertise to process this complex data. “

Copyright NPR 2020.