“Federal health IT officials are strategizing around modernized data infrastructure and capabilities, the cloud and telehealth to boost public health missions, agency representatives said during an AFCEA public health webinar this week.”
“Amid public health demands during the COVID-19 pandemic, modernization and data have been some forefront concerns of health IT officials as they try to keep up with demand for mission needs.”
“Vid Desai, CTO at Food and Drug Administration, for instance, said his agency has needed to revamp data infrastructure and is working to get there.”
“’The pandemic has obviously highlighted the need for a solid data infrastructure,’ Desai said. ‘We published the Technology Modernization Action Plan September of last year, and we had planned to publish a data plan to go along with that … we’ve now published that, we’ve hired a CDO and we’re forming a data team to start to address the data infrastructure issue.’”
“With better data infrastructure, Desai added, FDA can understand and act more effectively around certain critical areas, such as getting to better management of the agency’s supply chain. The infrastructure behind the data FDA has will enable the agency to better clean its data and make it more usable for mission areas overall, Desai said.”
“FDA Chief Medical Officer for In Vitro Diagnostics and Center for Devices and Radiological Health Medical Affairs Director Dr. Sara Brenner also plays a role in strengthening data in the public health realm of the federal government. She said she’s the diagnostic data lead the Health and Human Services Data Standards and Execution Workgroup, where she’s improving data quality, flow and extracting information from diagnostics as they’re increasingly being used for COVID-19.”
“Improvements in public health data systems, Brenner said, has been critical for improving understanding of diagnostics and getting a better understanding of COVID-19…” Read the full article here.
Source: Public Health Needs Modernized Data Infrastructure, Cloud — By Melissa Harris, April 1, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
