“The Department of Health and Human Services’ biosurveillance system is helping the agency better respond and pivot its data-sharing efforts to evolving demands.”
“HHS Protect, the agency’s COVID-19 biosurveillance system, has served as a common vantage point for what’s been happening in the U.S. regarding COVID-19 over the past year.”
“Using HHS Protect, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been among the agencies at the heart of the pandemic response to communicate information like facility capacities, COVID-19 statistics and vaccination numbers to both other agencies and the public.”
“’The number of domains and topics has forced us to collaborate in near real time. It’s been both a challenge and an opportunity,’ said CDC Chief Data Officer Alan Sim.”
“The pandemic demonstrated a need for a “whole-of-government approach,” said HHS Acting Chief Data Officer Kevin Duvall.”
“As such, CDC and HHS developed the platform to leverage data in understanding how the pandemic impacts the health care system — helping to deliver better resources to health care providers and enabling the public to get a full scope of the pandemic…”
“'[HHS Protect] is definitely something that has evolved as our data needs evolved throughout the process. What we collected from hospitals changed as we had certain spikes and increases on our health care system,’ Duvall said. ‘For the first time ever, we are releasing facility-level information about capacity…'” Read the full article here.
Source: Tracking COVID-19 Led to Better Data Sharing at HHS — By Sarah Sybert, May 13, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
