(CNN) — The public health advisers of the Government of U.S They said in a letter that they are “extremely concerned” and “distressed” by the administration’s decision Trump to change the way hospitals report COVID-19 data.
The letter, dated July 31, said hospitals were “struggling” to determine how to comply with the new daily reporting requirements for COVID-19 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), adding that removing the old system would put in compromise the integrity of the data. A doctor who signed the letter said the new data system was clouded by inconsistencies, making it “nearly impossible” to use to make real-time decisions during the pandemic.
“In the future,” the letter says, “it will be even more challenging to make meaningful interstate comparisons and understand which covid-19 mitigation strategies were successful (or failed).”
The nearly three dozen current and former members of the Advisory Committee on Infection Control Practices in Health Services (HICPAC) shared their concerns in a letter addressed to HHS and obtained by CNN. The committee is an independent group of experts that provides guidance to HHS and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on infection control strategies and practices.
When CNN inquired, HHS did not confirm whether it had received the letter. The committee members said the CDC, which is part of HHS, was informed of the letter.
In a memo on the Department of Health and Human Services website last month, the Trump administration ordered to hospitals to report all information on COVID-19 patients to HHS, rather than to CDC and HHS, as they had been doing.
The administration Trump He said the change would streamline the data collection process, but quickly drew criticism from public health officials.
Former Acting CDC Director Dr. Richard Besser, said at that time that diverting data from the hospital was a ‘step back’ for the response to the coronavirus from the country.
“It’s another example that the CDC is marginalized. Not only should the data get to the CDC, but the CDC should speak to the public through the media every day, “Besser told CNN.
This recent letter shared similar concerns.
“We are extremely concerned about this abrupt change in covid-19 reporting,” the letter read. Withdrawing the CDC system, which was in operation, would have “serious consequences for data integrity.”
By eliminating CDC’s data collection, the country would lose decades of experience in interpreting and analyzing information on infectious diseases and jeopardize the Department’s goals of developing interventions that would improve public health, the letter said.
The letter noted that the system that had been tracking the information, located in the CDC Health Care Quality Promotion Division (DHQP) is not simply a software system. It is a complex quality improvement and patient safety system that is maintained by an experienced team of physicians, epidemiologists, and infection prevention and control professionals.
The system, which began in 1970 to track healthcare-associated infections, is the most widely used system in the country on the subject, according to the group. It also tracks flu vaccination rates, blood safety errors, and more.
Hospitals have extensive experience in submitting crucial data to this system and trust it to properly track and analyze the data, the letter said.
Since hospitals now have to change the way they report data, they have had to rely on local public health experts or hospital associations to change reporting and data management. Making the switch during a pandemic puts this important data at risk, the letter’s signers argue.
“As past and present HICPAC members, we are concerned by the Administration’s unexpected decision to divert the CDC’s covid-19 data reports to DHHS,” the letter read. “We highly recommend that CDC’s DHQP data experts be allowed to continue their important and trusted work in their mission to save lives and protect Americans from health threats.”
Dr. Vineet Chopra, chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Michigan, signed the letter, saying that data from the CDC’s National Health Safety Network (NHSN) is essential. for the work that hospitals do.
During the pandemic, the University of Michigan accepted the majority of patient transfers between hospitals compared to any other hospital in the state, Chopra said; The NHSN data served as an important alert system that helped the hospital understand how the pandemic was unfolding in real time.
“We knew how to record data, how to extract data, and we know how to access it for prediction purposes,” Chopra said in an email. “In contrast, the new data system has many inconsistencies,” including reported cases, bed occupancy figures and the data itself is often out of date.
Many hospitals, he said, have had trouble understanding how the new system works and are not consistently entering data.
“In other words, the new system has performed smart calculations to inform nearly impossible real-time decisions,” wrote Chopra.
Chopra said the committee and many of his colleagues felt compelled to write the letter.
“I think the central problem that worries many of us is that it is not clear why this change was made,” wrote Chopra. “The system, as we knew it, worked very well and informed us at the height of the pandemic. We see no real reason to change it and certainly nothing good seems to have come out of it.
In a statement to CNN, an HHS official said the CDC system “was unable to keep up” with the demands of the pandemic.
“Today, the CDC has access to all the data they ever had and more. CDC’s NHSN was unable to keep up with the fast-paced data collection demands of the covid-19 pandemic, ” said Michael Caputo, HHS Under Secretary for Public Affairs, in an email.
“With this new, innovative and flexible collection mechanism, we have much more real data related to covid, much faster, giving us greater capacity for life-saving projects, such as the delivery of therapies. And now we are ready to move to automated data collection for use by all relevant experts at HHS, particularly the CDC.
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