COVID statistics now being sent to little known company with no background with data collection

Discussion in 'Politics' started by gwb-trading, Jul 21, 2020.

  1. gwb-trading

    gwb-trading

    COVID statistics are not being sent to CDC any more. Nor are they sent to Homeland Security. Nor are they sent to the federal Department of Health and Human Services They're being sent to some podunk "private technology firm" in Pittsburgh. Do I even need to mention that the CEO Michael Zamagias is a Trump supporter and also runs a real estate firm that took PPP money. Or that it was awarded with a no-bid contract.

    Little-Known Company Taking Over COVID Data From CDC Might Fall Short, Experts Fear
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/teletracking-covid-data-hospitals-cdc-nhsn

    Due to a Trump administration order earlier this month, thousands of hospitals will now bypass the CDC and instead funnel their COVID-19-related data to a Pittsburgh-based private technology firm that some experts say could be ill-equipped for the task.

    TeleTracking, which specializes in helping hospitals manage patient flow, had never before scored as large a government contract as it did this April when it clinched the $10.2 million deal to become a repository for hospitals’ COVID-19 data, according to government records. Now that the administration has elbowed aside the CDC’s infection tracking system, the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), TeleTracking is being launched from the land of four- and five-figure government contracts to the front lines of tracking the pandemic.

    TeleTracking: ‘Unknown,’ ‘Risky,’ ‘Not The Gold Standard’
    That has some experts concerned. The company’s track record just doesn’t compare to the CDC’s, said Karen Hoffmann, former president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

    “The biggest issue with this new data system is, they are not the gold standard with data,” she told TPM. “They have no history with infection preventionists, where the CDC is really considered the gold standard to be able to track and use their expertise and their technical support for collecting data.”

    “And for infection preventionists and epidemiologists that have a longstanding relationship with the CDC — decades to build — we don’t have that with TeleTracking,” she added. “We don’t know who’s on the other end, who can assist us, and if they have any personnel that have any epidemiologic knowledge to know what to do with that data.”

    The CDC’s NHSN was launched 15 years ago and has become known for its tracking and public recording of hospital infections. It has been collecting information on the COVID-19 outbreak since March.

    “Making this kind of change, in the middle of a pandemic, can be nothing but disruptive,” APIC director of regulatory affairs Nancy Hailpern told TPM. “TeleTracking is completely unknown. I don’t know of any of our members that use it because I’ve never heard of it before.”

    In a written statement to TPM, TeleTracking highlighted its 30 years of experience managing and tracking “hundreds of thousands” of hospital beds and managing “the movement of million patients across the care continuum.”

    “TeleTracking has been focused on this and only this for three decades, has invested over $1 billion in research and development, and was the tech company that not only launched the concept of patient flow and taught hospitals how to manage bed and room capacity, and was also the first to recognize and pioneer the health system command center model where critical—once disparate—functions centralize in order to make better, faster decisions about patient access and care,” spokesperson Amie Podolak wrote.

    TeleTracking did not respond to specific questions about the company’s capacity to handle the COVID-19 data, and did not make anyone available for an interview.

    Administration Talks Up A ‘Streamlined’ CDC Alternative
    The administration has been touting the TeleTracking system as a more efficient alternative to the NHSN, which they claim has been too slow to report hospitals’ data. CDC Director Robert Redfield used words like “rapid,” “streamlined” and “flexible” to describe TeleTracking’s system on a recent press call.

    “With TeleTracking, HHS is able to create new data fields and collect data from the more than 6,000 hospitals in the country in only 1-3 days,” HHS said in an emailed FAQ Monday. The same process took NHSN “weeks,” the email claimed.

    HHS did not offer further specifics about how the company so significantly outpaced the CDC.

    “This decision took some by surprise and raises a lot of questions going forward about how this private company is going to achieve that additional speed,” Jen Kates, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told TPM.

    “I think it’s important to understand what it takes to collect and interpret this data. It’s not counting noses,” added Liora Alschuler, CEO of Lanata Consulting Group, which has worked with NHSN in the past. “There are sound reasons why over 3,000 hospitals, about half those in the U.S., chose to report to NHSN.”

    There’s also the size of the company. TeleTracking has about 1,000 hospitals in its client base. According to Dun and Bradstreet, it has 300 employees across all of its locations and generates $58.16 million in annual revenue.

    “Such a company would generally be considered risky if not high risk” for the contract, said Peter Vinella, a former CIO of Capital Markets at Smith Barney who has overseen large data migration projects as a financial consultant.

    The Pittsburgh Business Times reported Monday that TeleTracking had recently hired a few dozen new employees, in part to work on the HHS contract, and that the company had created a government services entity separate from its normal work for hospitals and health systems.

    “Coming into this we had very long discussions. This is something we need to do, we believe we can help, but it cannot be, it cannot be, at the cost of losing focus on our customers,” Teletracking President Chris Johnson told the Business Times, referring to the HHS contract.

    “In order to do that we had to organize our business appropriately … to make sure we were dividing our client commitments from our federal commitments,” he added. “And we did that well. … We’ve been able to deliver on both fronts without slipping on either one.”

    In a written statement to TPM, TeleTracking’s Podolak said that the company “is uniquely qualified and was awarded the April 2020 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] to collect data on available hospital beds, hospital capacity, COVID-19 patients, patients in need of ventilation, etc.”

    Changing Horses Mid-Stream — Or Mid-Pandemic
    Alongside the possible shortcomings of TeleTracking as the NHSN’s replacement is the concern that thousands of hospitals are going to have to switch to the new system while in the throes of fighting a pandemic.

    Last week, the U.S. experienced a record-setting day of new COVID-19 cases with 75,000 infections recorded. Some states, particularly in the South and West, have re-shut down businesses and public spaces in the face of alarming spikes.

    “Hospitals right now are stretched very thin,” Hoffmann, the former president of APIC, told TPM. “Some are stretched to the max with no end in sight. And then, out of nowhere they have to do, overnight, a whole new system for reporting — which is really going to add significant burden, in most of our opinions, to already overwhelmed health care personnel and the health care system.”

    And the transition has happened quickly. HHS abruptly announced that the NHSN would no longer be an option as of July 15 in an initially little-noticed document posted on its website dated July 10. Before then, hospitals could use the NHSN, TeleTracking or their state health departments to submit data. They can still use the state health departments if they obtain a written release.

    Though there’s always some “tension” and “pain” inherent in such a transition, HHS CIO Jose Arrieta told reporters on a Monday press call, HHS has set up a network of help desks to smooth over the change. A senior HHS official said that since the actual data the hospitals are entering is the same as when the CDC was in charge, the process of submitting it should not be significantly different.

    Vinella, the former Wall Street CIO, said that such huge data tracking and repository systems usually take months, if not years, to set up, calling it an “impossible” feat for hospitals to adjust to the change so quickly.

    “At best, data will be lost or corrupted and hospitals will be unnecessarily burdened in the short run,” he said.




     
  2. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    surely a political donor has an ethical responsibility not to cater to the person giving him contracts, surely.
     
    Last edited: Jul 21, 2020
  3. gwb-trading

    gwb-trading

    [​IMG]
     
  4. gwb-trading

    gwb-trading

    Surprising no one.... the company ran by a Trump donor, TeleTracking, totally fails with COVID-19 data. It has not posted updates for hospital capacity and many other COVID data items since July 23rd. The company's data is full of errors.

    Tell us again how this is better than the CDC.


    Coronavirus data no longer going through CDC contains errors, misinformation: report
    https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...rus-data-no-longer-going-through-cdc-contains


    This is a complete fiasco!
     
  5. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    I mean, we told you guys
     
    Nine_Ender and Bugenhagen like this.
  6. gwb-trading

    gwb-trading

    Trump's buddy's firm, TeleTracking, is turning out to be a disaster in tracking COVID information. It is time to revert back to the CDC.

    First let's highlight the situation from late July...

    COVID-19 Hospital Data System That Bypasses CDC Plagued By Delays, Inaccuracies
    https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsbu...burgh-based-company-to-take-over-for-cdc.html

    The HHS Protect Public Data Hub, the public-facing website set up by HHS, offers three items as a "Hospital Utilization Snapshot," all of which have data that is over a week old.
    • A "Downloadable Dataset" estimating how many hospital beds are occupied by state — last updated on July 21.
    • A table tallying the total number of hospital beds occupied across the country, which has not been updated since July 23.
    • A map showing the percent of hospital beds occupied by state, which has not been updated since July 23.
    (plus many other issues in addition to the above which are all still uncorrected in mid-August)

    Let's take a look at what Hospitals are saying.... The TeleTracking HHS system is a disaster. Nobody can submit data. The data has no integrity. It is down continually plus a whole bunch more. Now the US Public Health Advisors have sent a strongly worded letter -- let's see if that gets the Trump administration to fix all the issues.


    Health advisers to the government say hospitals are 'scrambling' after Trump administration's 'abrupt' change to Covid-19 data reporting requirements
    https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/14/health/hospital-covid-19-data-letter/index.html

    In a letter, public health advisers to the US government said they are "extremely concerned" and "troubled" by the Trump administration's decision to change how hospitals report Covid-19 data.

    The letter, dated July 31, described hospitals as "scrambling" to determine how to meet new daily Covid-19 reporting requirements to the US Department of Health and Human Services, and said retiring the older system jeopardized data integrity. One doctor who signed the letter said the new data system was marred by inconsistencies, rendering it "almost impossible" to use for real-time decisions during the pandemic.

    "Moving forward," the letter says, "it will be even more challenging to perform meaningful inter-state comparisons, and to understand which COVID-19 mitigation strategies were successful (or failed)."

    The nearly three dozen current and former members of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee shared their concerns in a letter intended for HHS and obtained by CNN. The committee is an independent group of experts that provides guidance to the HHS and the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention on infection control practices and strategies.

    When asked by CNN, HHS did not confirm if it had received the letter. Members of the committee said that the CDC, which is part of HHS, was informed of the letter.

    In a memo on the HHS website last month, the Trump administration ordered hospitals to report all Covid-19 patient information to HHS, rather than to the CDC and HHS, as they had been doing.

    The Trump administration said the change would streamline the data collection process, but it swiftly drew criticism from public health officials.

    Former CDC Acting Director Dr. Richard Besser said at the time that rerouting hospital data was a "step backwards" for the country's coronavirus response.

    "It's another example of CDC being sidelined. Not only should the data be coming to CDC, but CDC should be talking 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 said. Retiring the CDC system that was in operation would have "serious consequences on data integrity."

    By removing the data collection from the CDC, the country would lose decades of expertise in interpreting and analyzing information about infectious disease and it would jeopardize the department's goals of developing interventions that would improve public health, the letter said.

    The letter said the system that had been tracking the information, housed in the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, is not merely a software system. It is a complex patient safety and quality improvement system that is maintained by an experienced team of doctors, epidemiologists and infection prevention and control professionals.

    The system, which was started in 1970 to track health care-associated infections, is the country's most widely used system on the subject, according to the group. It also tracks flu vaccination rates, blood safety errors and more.

    Hospitals have extensive experience sending crucial data to this system and trust that it appropriately tracks and analyzes the data, the letter said.

    Since hospitals now have to change the way they report the data, they have had to rely on local public health experts or hospital associations to change reporting and management of data. Making the shift during a pandemic puts this important data at risk, the letter writers argue.

    "As past and present HICPAC members, we are troubled by the Administration's unexpected decision to divert Covid-19 data reporting from CDC to DHHS," the letter said. "We strongly advise that the 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 and said the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network data is essential to the work hospitals do.

    During the pandemic, the University of Michigan accepted the most inter-hospital transfers of patients compared to any other hospital in the state, Chopra said; the NHSN data served as an important warning system that helped the hospital understand how the pandemic was unfolding in real time.

    "We knew how to input 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 with cases reported, bed occupancy numbers and that data itself is often out of date.

    Many hospitals, he said, have struggled to understand how to us the new system and aren't entering data consistently.

    "In other words, the new system has made intelligent calculations to inform real time decisions almost impossible," Chopra wrote.

    Chopra said the committee and many of his colleagues felt pushed to write the letter.

    "I think the core problem that bothers many of us is it's unclear why this change was made," Chopra wrote. "The system as we knew it worked very well and did inform us in the height of the pandemic. We see no real reason to change it and certainly no good appears to have come from 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, CDC has access to all the data it once had and more. The CDC's NHSN was unable to keep up with the fast-paced data collection demands of the COVID-19 pandemic," Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an email. "Using this new, innovative and flexible collection mechanism, we have far more COVID-related real data, far faster, giving us increased capacity for life-saving projects like therapeutics distribution. And we are now poised to move to automated data collection for the use of every relevant expert at HHS, particularly the CDC."

    (IMO it can only be assumed that the intent of the Trump administration is to hide the data before the November election. This level of incompetence can only be deliberate.)
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2020
  7. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    Elect a "businessman" they said...
    He knows the best people they said...