“The Department of Health and Human Services is looking to build off the COVID-19 data platform it established during the pandemic to leverage public health data and respond to future public health crises.”
“As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded last year, HHS sought a data-driven response, but according to HHS Chief Data Scientist and Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Kristen Honey, there was no one data source to drive that response. As a result agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created HHS Protect, a secure data-sharing platform to guide the government’s COVID-19 pandemic response.”
“HHS not only connected data sources across health agencies, but also it sought new ways to collect COVID-19 data in HHS Protect, such as point-of-case diagnostic data. This involved incorporating different tools that states, localities, communities and organizations were using to collect data, not just those of diagnostic laboratories.”
“Now that HHS has built out HHS Protect — as well as its public-facing version, HHS Protect Public — Honey said the system’s infrastructure will make health data actionable beyond the pandemic.
‘The ecosystem has matured more, the data sharing has matured more, and we’ve built up a lot of infrastructure and responsiveness to adapt to a rapidly moving virus and pandemic and all of its major impacts on our society,’ Honey said. ‘How do we intentionally keep that infrastructure that helped us in COVID so it can improve other mission bases, so that it can help all of Health and Human Services, and we’re not just going back to the old ways of business?'”
“One of the ways that HHS is looking to expand data capabilities is through recent strides standing up its Office of the Chief Data Officer, which has helped HHS establish its data governance board and guidance on how to leverage data as a strategic asset. The HHS CDO and CIO are now partnering with the CDC, FDA, NIH and other agencies involved with HHS Protect to intentionally keep the platform’s infrastructure to help use data for future crises…” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS to Sustain COVID-19 Data Platform for Future Health Crises – By Melissa Harris, September 3, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
