The Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy working group comprised executives from LabCorp, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and CommonWell Health Alliance. The group outlined two main guiding principles: creating data interoperability solutions within the next 30 to 90 days and using existing infrastructure rather than building new data systems.
Here are three immediate ways to improve data exchange and interoperability to contain COVID-19, according to the researchers:
1. Expand commercial lab and point-of-care test manufacturer reporting systems so patient demographic information is recording along with their COVID-19 samples. CMS can use payment incentives or adjustments to enable organizations processing COVID-19 tests to add this information and support contact tracing efforts. The demographic information would include patient names, birth dates, gender, race/ethnicity and address or phone number.
2. Local and state health officials should create a minimum dataset for COVID-19 containment as part of participating in clinical data exchanges. Limited public health resources prevent application programming interface-powered data, so officials should choose a portal-based system instead as the way to onboard participants in the clinical data exchange.
3. Federal, state and local public health officials should expand their use of the National Syndromic Surveillance Program and create an agreed set of protocols for choosing which COVID-19-related data could be used for federal surveillance.
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