Thursday, 16 July 2020_US CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said Wednesday on a conference call with reporters that states were told to stop sending hospital information to the National Healthcare Safety Network site, the CDC’s system for gathering data, beginning Wednesday. He added that the decision was made in conjunction with the CDC.
“In order to meet the needs for flexibility of data gathering, CDC has agreed to remove the National Health Safety Network from the collection process in order to streamline reporting,” he said. “This has no effect on CDCs ability to use data and continue to churn out daily data, the MMWRs and the guidance that we publish.”
Caputo said the change in policy will allow the U.S. to collect more complete data and to do so more quickly. He added that the CDC will still “participate in this streamlined all-of-government response,” but they will no longer control the data reporting element.
“Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report,” Caputo said. “Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data; America requires it in real time.”
Jose Arrieta, chief information officer for HHS, said on Wednesday’s conference call that despite the change in reporting systems, the government will continue to release data occasionally to the public through the CDC. Arrieta said the HHS data was initially for analysis and policy decisions rather than for the general public, but said some of the data is released publicly through the CDC.
He added that HHS is working to make more of its data publicly available.
“We’ve been focused on collecting data so that we could perform analysis and allocate resources in an effective manner,” he said, adding that some data is released through the CDC.
“There is a possibility that that we could do it at a larger scale... That’s the ultimate vision.”
Dr. Janis Orlowski, who serves on the working group formed by White House health advisor Dr. Deborah Birx to improve the national data reporting system, said the group was formed because the administration was concerned that some hospitals were misreporting or failing to report critical Covid-19 information to the CDC.
Orlowski, chief health care officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said most hospitals were doing their best to report up-to-date information but many were inundated with redundant requests from separate agencies.
“Because [hospitals] were reporting into agencies, and using different portals for the data to be submitted, and besides the portals, they could report to the state, as you can imagine, this became a data issue of how do you coordinate all this,” she said. “So our job became see, can we simplify the reporting process.”
Orlowski said Birx and other administration officials gave their word to the working group, which includes CDC staff, that the change wouldn’t hamper the quality or transparency of the data. However, she said she doesn’t know whether outside researchers, like universities that are tracking the outbreak, will have the same access to the data as before.
“They had verbally told us that transparency would remain,” she said. “And so those of us who are on the working group didn’t see this as the CDC being cut out.”
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said “the data is still going to be shared with CDC.” He said Wednesday that there has been frustration over the CDC’s data reporting, but that the administration may have been better off fixing those issues within the CDC, rather than trying “to re-create the wheel.”
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