About two years ago, when Dr. Anne Zink, Chief Medical Officer of Alaska, first heard about China’s lockdown due to the novel coronavirus, her first thought was that she needed to enable the state’s laboratory to be able to communicate with her epidemiology. The team shares information.
“I know if that doesn’t exist, we will struggle,” she said in a discussion at HIMSS Digital.
Even with this vision and the country’s efforts to strengthen its IT systems, the fact that they often do not cooperate makes her feel that when Covid-19 hits the United States, she is “running upstream”
“We really let the National Guard sit in our laboratory space and put an active laboratory into three different IT systems to make it work. There is a screaming room in our laboratory that says’tip It’s called’, it’s full of faxes that need to be entered,” she said. “I made our epi team burst into tears because they said,’I just can’t get into it fast enough, we don’t know what happened to the system, we don’t know what happened to the pandemic, because I really can’ don’t type it.'”
For many other public health officials across the United States, the situation is similar. The lack of integration makes it difficult to paint a clear picture of what is happening in real time.
If there is a silver lining, the pandemic clearly shows that public health needs more support, especially from an IT perspective. Jonathan Weiner, founder and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health Information Technology (CPHIT), said that through public and private investment, they have finally caught up.
His role in responding to the pandemic is slightly different. To fill the information gap in the early days of the pandemic, Johns Hopkins University created the Covid-19 Resource Page, which quickly became the preferred source of information for many people.
He said that this effort began with the cooperation of engineers from China who offered to help after realizing that both regions were struggling to cope with the same data shortage challenge.
Better sharing of information between hospitals and public health departments is essential for future pandemic response and other pressing health issues. For example, Zink is also a well-trained emergency doctor. She said that if she can see in the hospital’s electronic medical records that someone has not been vaccinated, she can see if they missed the second vaccination or took the opportunity to reach out Helping hand.
Another example: Her team has recently been able to see from data from the hospital emergency department that heroin overdose has been increasing. They can send messages to clinicians to ensure that Narcan kits are on hand in emergency rooms and EMS.
“If we have timely actionable data, we can move there faster,” she said. “If there is no good IT information exchange, especially in areas such as highly contagious diseases, we will be blind and vulnerable.”
Photo credit: Ksenia Zvezdina, Getty Images
