Next shot of public health to fix data issues

COVID Data Wakeup Call: It should have been simple. The lab that reported the Covid-19 test results at the start of the pandemic decided to use only one of the two codes. Instead, some hospitals got 200.

The digital clutter caused by human coding errors required huge amounts of time and staff investment to clean up. This was just one example of the turmoil surrounding the country, as authorities, hospitals and doctors were trying to get a clear picture of what was happening. It was often buried under the fax, resulting in late arrivals and missing important information.

Currently, the federal government is looking at ways to overhaul awkward medical IT systems, backed by public health and technicians. More digital means of communication Left wing Rely on fax machines and paper records For important tasks like contact tracing. In some states, it was even necessary to call the National Guard to manually enter the data. However, digitization means encouraging laboratories, hospitals, and providers to use standardized technology systems. And in the US healthcare system, public or private, it wasn’t always quick or easy.

Micky Tripathi, leader of the HHS Medical Information Technology Office, convened a task force to make recommendations. One idea under consideration is to make it easier for the federal government and states to share computing infrastructure and public health departments to share data and new software programs.

“The pandemic has exposed the rocks below the surface, giving us an idea of ​​where to invest,” Tripathi told Future Pulse.

Modernization efforts It started in earnest when Congressional budgeters first secured the money, and it’s actually a date before Covid. We will update public health technology in 2019. However, the pandemic exposed a serious drawback and urged Congress to send an additional tranche of medical technology dollars in a bailout package and an annual spending bill. The 2022 Home Health Bill includes an additional $ 100 million and will soon be heading to the floor.

The question is whether it will bring results in time. Some outside experts say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies have been slow to respond to new discoveries. Larges. “We had over $ 1 billion allocated to genomic surveillance data, but a penny didn’t work,” wrote Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, in an email. And public health funding is often siled and used for specific illnesses rather than comprehensive technology.

Concerns are raised by experts saying that it is a familiar pattern of spending large sums of money in times of crisis. Inadvertent and resource expiration continues. “I am a little worried [the momentum] Shannon Sartin, a CIOX Health executive who was previously involved in government medical technology, said.

A more complex issue is the growing resistance to political rights to federal public health responses.Such emotions can complicate what is expected Immunization registry modernization, the flagship database that helps track inoculations, warned Rebecca Coyle, head of the American Immunization Registry Association.

The upgraded registry could help authorities track influenza vaccination campaigns and share data across state boundaries, she said. But every time a vaccine comes out, she says, “a large influx of anti-vaccines will do their best to derail something.” It undermines coordination between vaccinated people and others in the public health community.

Welcome to Future Pulse, which explores the fusion of healthcare and technology. Share news and feedback: @dariustahir, @ali_lev, @abettel, @ TheSabin923, @Ben ___ Leonard..

Jen Holon Jeff | #askpatients @jhoronjeff “Today we can send another millionaire into space, but medical records will be sent. [in disc form]
Does anyone have a time machine so that they can go back to 1998 and use the CD-ROM? “

Ask an expert: What to do with false alarms and social media on vaccines?: Of President Joe Biden Public brawl with Facebook Misinformation about the Covid vaccine has been the most controversial ever between tech giants and the White House. POLITICO’s Alexandra S. Levine checked in Joan Donovan, Research Director of Harvard Shorestein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

What’s your impression of going back and forth between the White House and Facebook?

It reminds us of much of the old debate that “guns do not kill people, people kill people”. We are at the stage of the consequences of false information accumulated over the years, leveraging the scale and scope of media manipulators, politicians who use social media for political gain, especially messaging. More … Social media is accelerating this misinformation problem on a large scale.

Where are we now?

We are now in the process of motivating people not to take action with false information, so we have to deal with the wrong information question. … Technology companies are not responsible for what they build. That’s why we see regulators move away from Section 230. [the part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which protects online platforms from liability for content their users post] And data interoperability … antitrust law.

Social media offers this large-scale broadcast feature that is highly regulated when using television, print and radio, but for some reason the technology is the Internet, so ideologically people say it’s Of the government, I’m crazy about this idea that it’s somehow out of jurisdiction. ”

What’s next?

I think the government needs to pay attention to the development of what is called a partisan platform, which has very low standards for content moderation. Radical people. It is necessary to understand what kind of high-quality information is released in large quantities and think from a regulatory point of view. In other words, who is responsible for the broadcasting station and individual speakers? I think some of the conversation really needs to be reviewed rather than focusing on false information as a very specific domain.

The other part of the question is how to actually imagine “incitement”. What is the stimulus if there is an anti-vaccination campaign to hire people on social media platforms such as Facebook for more than 10 years, not just after January 6th? What is such pollution if you are disseminating false information? … The problem is much bigger than the technical part. But that should not be ignored by us.

Compliance cost: The Biden administration wants to raise the fines hospitals face to hide price data, and is paying attention to the advice of researchers who think it will take a big blow to curb abuse of market power. Ben Leonard of POLITICO writes.

This week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed raising the maximum annual penalty for non-compliance with the price transparency obligations of the Trump era from $ 109,500 per hospital to $ 2 million. Many facilities are not compliant.. CMS said that depending on the transaction with the insurance company, there is “large variability in price” of consumers even within hospitals and systems. It is believed that having easy-to-digest information in the patient’s hands will allow patients to make smarter cost decisions and potentially reduce medical costs.

But the hospital still needs to play the ball. We have also provided a high degree of protection for the “Charge Master,” which lists billable items and services that insurance companies and patients often pay. A survey of 100 randomly selected hospitals published at JAMA Internal Medicine in June found that 83 hospitals did not comply with at least one major federal requirement.

Hospitals that lost a last-minute court battle to overturn policy said the requirements were burdensome.

Tracker tracking: The legislative action of the California State Legislature has revived a privacy proposal that could set new standards for regulating smart health devices and trackers, wrote Susannah Luthi of POLITICO.

Congressman Edwin Chau is trying to protect personal data collected on smart health devices using the same privacy protection that California gives to information collected in the medical setting. This effort has been applied to popular fitness and childbirth trackers and has received fierce opposition from tech groups and medical device manufacturers.

Chow’s first bid to regulate smart health devices this year never reached the parliamentary floor for a full vote. Last month, before a major legislative deadline, he reintroduced the same word using the unrelated privacy measure bill number that passed Congress in April. The amended bill will need to return to the parliamentary floor for a full vote, even if it passes the Senate.

Past efforts to police health trackers are gaining momentum in the state. Former Attorney General and current Minister of State for Health Xavier Becerra fined $ 250,000 for the makers of the giving birth app Glow last year for failing to properly protect consumer data.

How close are you to the recent health technology headlines? (Answer below)

1) The housing spending plan covers this much for President Joe Biden’s new biomedical research institute ARPA-H. This is less than half of the total requested by the White House.
A) $ 30 million. B) $ 300 million. C) $ 3 billion. D) $ 30 billion.

2) According to McKinsey, telemedicine use is much more stable than before the pandemic.
A) 5. B) 15. C) 27. D) 38.

3) The travel industry can currently proceed with plans to use Covid vaccine credentials to determine if passengers are immunized.
A) Cruise line. B) Airline. C) Passenger railroad. D) Bus.

4) A Dutch surveillance group states that Covid vaccine producer Moderna is deliberately working from these two locations to avoid paying high taxes on the sale of shots.
A) Puerto Rico and the Channel Islands. B) Switzerland and Delaware. C) Ireland and the Bahamas. D) India and Florida.

5) The new Surgeon President’s report calls this an “urgent threat to public health.”
A) Refuse to wear a mask. B) Mix the two Covid shots. C) False alarms on vaccines on social media. D) Cyber ​​attacks on hospitals.

Did you do a duel death and case model at the beginning of the pandemic? Damage trustAsk Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

Perform a cyberattack between the state and a rogue attacker Become new normalContemplate the New York Times.

And: Is there a length to grow Many of the clinical notes foresee a larger burnout among doctors, EHR Intelligence asks.

Answers to pop quizzes: 1) C. 2) D. 3) A. 4) B. 5) C.