HOSPITALS TO BYPASS CDC ON VIRUS DATA
Trump administration order alarms health experts, who fear information will be politicized
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all coronavirus patient information to a central database in Washington beginning today. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
The new instructions were posted in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the CDC — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions.
“Historically, CDC has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak,” said Jen Kates, the director of global health and HIV policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
“How will the data be protected?” she asked. “Will there be transparency, will there be access, and what is the role of the CDC in understanding the data?”
News of the change came as a shock at the CDC, according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Michael Caputo, a Health and Human Services spokesman, called the CDC’S system inadequate and said the two systems would be linked. The CDC would continue to make data public, he said.
“Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data,” Caputo said. “America requires it in real time. The new, faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined allof-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
But the instructions to hospitals in the department guidance is explicit and underscored: “As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the COVID-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site,” the CDC’S system for gathering data from more than 25,000 medical centers around the country.
Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the CDC; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.
“Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. “It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like CDC to do its basic job.”
The shift grew out of a tense conference call several weeks ago between hospital executives and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. After Birx said hospitals were not adequately reporting their data, she convened a working group of government and hospital officials who devised the new plan, according to Dr. Janis
Orlowski, the chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who participated in the group’s meetings.
The change exposes the vast gaps in the government’s ability to collect and manage health data — an antiquated system at best, experts say. The CDC has been collecting coronavirus data through its National Healthcare Safety Network, which was expanded at the outset of the pandemic to track hospital capacity and patient information specific to COVID-19.
In its new guidance, Health and Human Services said that going forward, hospitals should report detailed information on a daily basis directly to the new centralized system, which is managed by Teletracking, a health data firm with headquarters in Pittsburgh. However, if hospitals were already reporting such information to their states, they could continue to do so if they received a written release saying the state would handle reporting.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, has raised questions about the Teletracking contract, calling it a “noncompetitive, multimilliondollar contract” for a “duplicative health data system.”