DATA TRENDS DURING COVID-19 Derived from experts directly involved with the COVID-19 response, these trends stand out as common experiences for government agencies. Funding, prior data investments and clearly defined roles and policies were integral to successful responses.
HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGES EXPAND IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19 Data-sharing saves lives. The COVID-19 death toll is a number so numbing that it’s easy to gloss over the fact that behind every life lost, health care providers are frantically trying to treat patients with unknown conditions and diverse maladies. Seconds, minutes and hours matter on the front lines. For that reason, health information exchanges (HIEs) save lives by expediting the time it takes to diagnose and treat patients, and North Carolina’s NC HealthConnex program has been perfectly suited to the COVID-19 medical response. “It’s really about building ecosystems across the country,” John Correllus, Chief Data Officer for North Carolina, said. NC HealthConnex and HIEs generally work as neutral data stewards, providing a centralized store of medical data that hospitals and health care facilities securely tap into for patient records. The technology saves valuable treatment time by providing health professionals with patient information that they otherwise would have to test for or diagnose on site. 16
If a patient has a pre-existing condition, for example, COVID-19 can be especially dangerous. Health care providers can better respond to COVID-19 when they know patient information, but information silos within and across health care units can bottle up pertinent patient data. HIEs compile data from disparate sources into one hub of information that health care providers can access on the spot, as long as they’re part of the network. North Carolina has expanded data feeds during the pandemic, and about 120 hospitals are currently part of NC HealthConnex. “If COVID would have happened even two years from now, we’d have been even more connected, so that’s one of our top priorities,” Correllus said. COVID-19, Correllus believes, has highlighted systemic issues with clinical data-sharing and shown that the country needs a national data-sharing ecosystem for patients. In the U.S., patients’ information is not kept in one place. While hospitals all maintain patient records, the information that one hospital has, another care facility might not. Therefore, patient information needs to be
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