“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is on the cusp of launching their ‘Protect Now’ program designed to bring disparate data sets together and provide better visibility to HHS on the spread of COVID, number of hospital beds, supply levels, etc. HHS has awarded two contracts to Palantir Technologies in support of this effort, both with April 2020 start dates.”
HHS Protect Now
“While HHS has not yet published specific details on their ‘Protect Now’ effort, a HHS spokesperson described the HHS Protect Now platform to the Daily Beast as a platform which will pull ‘data from across the federal government, state and local governments, healthcare facilities, and colleges, to help administration officials determine how to ‘mitigate and prevent spread’ of the coronavirus.’ This data, according to the spokesperson will be used by HHS as they continue to provide the White House coordinator for COVID response, Dr. Deborah Brix, with nightly briefings.”
“HHS, as would be expected, is working with both FEMA and CDC data and personnel in ‘painting a picture for the (White House) Task Force and state and local leaders to show the impact of their decisions.’”
“HHS noted that 187 data sets are currently integrated into the HHS Protect Now platform. These include:
- Hospital Capacity;
- Inventories;
- Government supply chain;
- Industry supply chain;
- Diagnostic testing data;
- Geographic testing data;
- Demographic statistics;
- State Policy actions;
- Emergency Department data; and more.”
“The HHS spokesperson shared an example, ‘For instance, if there are a number of cases concentrated at a hospital next to an airport and a mass transit stop, we can build a predictive model using a transmission chain to predict how quickly the disease will spread taking into account these factors…'” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS COVID “Protect Now” Taps Palantir Technologies – By Christopher Burgess, April 27, 2020. ClearanceJobs.
