“COVID-19 data collection and sharing has changed throughout the pandemic at the Department of Health and Human Services to meet the needs of agencies, hospitals, industry and the public, said Kevin Duvall, acting chief data officer, Thursday.”
“The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response supports hospitals with personal protective equipment like masks and medicine. So when it had issues distributing the drug remdesivir in July, HHS began asking hospitals to report their supply.”
“HHS further made its COVID-19 Community Profile Report, an internal tool originally, available to the public in December as a “highly consumable” PDF, as well as an .xlsx file for deeper analysis, said Duvall, who was instrumental in the effort.”
“’The data had to evolve with how the government was responding to the pandemic,’ Duvall said. ‘Over time, as we got more comfortable with datasets and felt that the quality of the data was good and sound, there was more and more release of open data.’”
“HealthData.gov‘s look changed in the past week as HHS migrated it to a new platform with additional capabilities — namely machine-readable, API-accessible interfaces for every dataset to assist researchers, companies and journalists.”
“The separate HHS Protect Public Data Hub and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID Data Tracker represent a year of work…” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS data collection and sharing continues to evolve with the pandemic — By Dave Nyczepir, March 19, 2021. FedScoop.
