The Path Forward: Building on Lessons Learned from COVID-19 was discussed by Anita Cicero, JD Deputy Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
One issue centered on at-home diagnostics for viral threats. She suggested that BARDA, FDA, and CMS should review at-home diagnostic technologies to be prioritized. She also emphasized the need to prioritize public health as some of the state and local public health agencies are still reliant on 1950 technologies while the hospitals in the area are fully in the 21st century. This has resulted in a technological disconnect between public health and health systems.
Public health agencies at the local and state levels should be seamlessly connected to healthcare providers and labs in order to collect more accurate, standardized, real-time data to use to develop uniform systems for reporting on testing, positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Lastly, the $500 million in the American Rescue Plan to establish the National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics to provide for data modernization to be established as a permanent capability.
Les Becker, Deputy Secretary of Innovation and Technology, Washington State Department of Health https://www.doh.wa.gov, explained how the State of Washington established the Healthcare and Emergency Logistics Tracking Hub (WA HEALTH) as a public-private partnership with the healthcare system and Microsoft to provide actionable data for public health and medical preparedness.
The first hurdle is to deal with the lack of digital bridges between public health and EHRs since EHRs are generally not built to send data to public health systems automatically. To address the lack of digital bridges between public health and EHRs, federal funding for electronic case reporting could initiate broad scale secure reporting from EHRs in clinical organizations to public health agencies across all jurisdictions and support interoperable and intelligent real time reporting from multiple sources.
The next hurdle is to enable data systems in hospitals, laboratories, and public health data systems to be interoperable. During COVID-19, hospitals worked with Departments of Health to develop the necessary mechanisms for exchange.
Les Becker summed up by saying, “Finally, public health data systems must be cloud-based to allow for rapid scalability in order to respond to a global pandemic in real time and built for the 21st century. The example of WA HEALTH shows that public health has the capability to develop up-to-date data systems and actionable dashboards.”
For more information on the Senate hearing The Path Forward: Building on Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic held July 27, 2021, go to https://help.senate.gov/hearings