New paper out in #JAMIA @AMIAinformatics today: barriers to hospital electronic reporting to public health agencies (with @NateApathy and @j_r_a_m) https://academic.oup.com/jamia/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jamia/ocaa112/5842141

Lots of attention to the lack of syndromic surveillance data in early days of #COVID19 in great articles and tweets from folks like @chrissyfarr @dariustahir @amalec. We used national hospital data from AHA to determine what the barriers were.

Unsurprisingly, the most prevalent barrier to electronic data reporting was public health agency ability to receive that data, with over 40% of hospitals reporting.

We also found significant variation across states in the proportion of hospitals reporting their public health agency was unable to electronically receive data, reflecting different levels of IT capability at state and local agencies.

Takeaway: digitizing hospital records without a concomitant investment in the IT capabilities of state and local public health agencies contributed to our reliance on a patchwork system of fax, email, and paper to track the spread of COVID-19.

Also read other great work on the subject in Politico https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/10/coronavirus-health-records-245483 CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/04/syndromic-surveillance-useful-to-track-pandemics-like-covid-19.html and Health Affairs blog https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200413.644614/full/