Lambert Strether says that the missing piece in data interchange between disparate health care systems is a standard (and easily expansible) data schema, provided for the first time by the move to HHS. Necessary, but insufficient!
After terrorists slammed a plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, ambulances rushed scores of the injured to community hospitals, but only three of the patients were taken to specialized trauma wards. The reason: The hospitals and ambulances had no real-time information-sharing system. Nineteen years later, there is still no national data network that enables the health system to respond effectively to disasters and disease outbreaks. Many doctors and nurses must fill out paper forms on COVID-19 cases and available beds and fax them to public health agencies, causing critical delays in care and hampering the effort to track and block the spread of the coronavirus.
The Covid situation in India equally chaotic, if not more. Chaos reins on many fronts: People don’t know when they have contracted the disease, How to get a test done, when to home quarantine, when should they transition to Hospital care, Protocols to be followed by Doctors at different stages of the disease, Protocols after the virus disappears from the body but the aftereffects still persist etc.
As a country, we need to increase consistency and accountability in the heath system. Protocols for treating different diseases and different conditions need to be worked out and made available to prevent errors in treating patients. Such uniformity requires a good data system. We need to be thinking long and hard about making improvements in the data-reporting system so the response to the next epidemic is a little less painful. The present data system in the country is fragmented to the extent of being unusable and which cannot be analyzed for future learning.
We need to firstly frame the rules of data reporting and informing the medical profession (This can be sensitive and needs vetting). Secondly, the necessary hardware and reporting systems to electronically receive data also need to be put in place. Most importantly, this data needs constant analysis to provide useful information to improve healthcare.
Information presently available included details of Covid cases, their geographical distribution and progress of patients, but doesn’t include data on the availability of hospital beds, intensive care units or supplies needed for a seamless pandemic response.
Though the Central and State Governments have made some data sharing efforts, no comparable effort has emerged to build an effective system for quickly moving information on infectious disease from providers to public health agencies.
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