Congress Told HHS to Set Up a Health Data Network in 2006. The Agency Still Hasn’t.

In early 2020, as they tried to fight covid-19 across two rural counties in North Carolina, the staff of Granville Vance Public Health was stymied, relying on outdated technology to track a fast-moving pandemic. Lisa Macon Harrison, the agency’s health director, said her nurses’ contact-tracing process required manually entering case information into five data systems. One was decades old and complicated. Another was made of Excel spreadsheets. None worked well together or with systems at other levels of government. “We were using a lot of resources putting an inordinate amount of data into multiple systems that weren’t necessarily scaled to talk t...

Read the full post at Syndicate – Kaiser Health News