The pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed gaps in the nation’s public health infrastructure that pose challenges to effective communication between health care providers and public health agencies. According to ONC analyses of nationally representative survey data from hospitals and physicians collected in 2019, over 70% of hospitals experienced at least one major challenge with electronic public health reporting and less than 1 in 5 primary care physicians—and about a quarter of pediatric and internal medicine primary care physicians—reported electronically exchanging data with public health agencies. It is important to note that ONC’s analysis did not report on physicians’ overall levels of public health reporting—which often occur through manual, paper-based methods—nor does it reflect recent levels of electronic public health reporting which may have improved during the pandemic. Moreover, low rates of electronic reporting may be due, in part, to variation in jurisdictional requirements (i.e., most jurisdictions do not require electronic data submission for public health reporting) as well as PHAs’ capacity to electronically receive standardized data from physicians and hospitals.
Together these findings suggest there is a need to increase rates of electronic public health reporting and improve methods of exchange between health care providers and public health agencies to ensure the availability of complete, accurate, and timely data for ongoing pandemic response and future public health preparedness… Read the full article here.
