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Billions in Hospital Virus Aid Rested on Compliance With Private Vendor

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  tessylo  •  4 years ago  •  9 comments

By:   Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times

Billions in Hospital Virus Aid Rested on Compliance With Private Vendor

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



Health

Billions in Hospital Virus Aid Rested on Compliance With Private Vendor





Sheryl Gay Stolberg


8d4cbc30-bbe6-11ea-bfbf-b19ea2013e93 August 24, 2020, 8:10 AM EDT









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Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, during a coronavirus task force meeting in Washington, June 26, 2020. (Michael A. McCoy/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration tied billions of dollars in badly needed coronavirus medical funding this spring to hospitals’ cooperation with a private vendor collecting data for a new COVID-19 database that bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The highly unusual demand, aimed at hospitals in coronavirus hot spots using funds passed by Congress with no preconditions, alarmed some hospital administrators and even some federal health officials.

The office of the health secretary, Alex Azar, laid out the requirement in an April 21 email obtained by The New York Times that instructed hospitals to make a one-time report of their COVID-19 admissions and intensive care unit beds to TeleTracking Technologies, a company in Pittsburgh whose $10.2 million, five-month government contract has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

“Please be aware that submitting this data will inform the decision-making on targeted Relief Fund payments and is a prerequisite to payment,” the message read.




The financial condition, which has not been previously reported, applied to money from a $100 billion “coronavirus provider relief fund” established by Congress as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27. Two days later, the administration instructed hospitals to make daily reports to the CDC, only to change course.

“Another data reporting ask,” a regional official in the Health Department informed colleagues in an email exchange obtained by the Times, adding: “It comes with $$ incentive. We really need a consolidated message on the reporting/data requests, this is past ridiculous.”

A colleague replied, “Another wrinkle. What a mess.”

The disclosure of the demand in April is the most striking example to surface of the department’s efforts to expand the role of private companies in health data collection, a practice that critics say infringes on what has long been a central mission of the CDC. Last month, the federal Health Department moved beyond financial incentives and abruptly ordered hospitals to send daily coronavirus reports to TeleTracking, not the CDC, raising concerns about transparency and reliability of the data.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services say that the moves were necessary to improve and streamline data collection in a crisis, and that the one-time reports collected in April by TeleTracking were not available from any other source.

“The national health system has not been challenged in this way in any time in recent history,” Caitlin Oakley, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement, adding that TeleTracking offered a “standardized national hospital capacity tracking system which provided more real-time, better informed data to make decisions from.”

But critics remain alarmed.

“In the middle of a pandemic, the Trump administration is using funds meant to support hospitals as a tool to coerce them to use an unproven, untrusted and deeply flawed system that sidelines public health experts,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, said in a statement.

In a statement, TeleTracking said it has three decades of experience providing health care systems “with actionable data and unprecedented visibility to make better, faster decisions.”

Still, public health experts and hospital executives are puzzled as to why the health agency chose such a difficult time to employ an untested private vendor rather than improve the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, a decades-old disease tracking system that was deeply familiar to hospitals and state health departments.

The NHSN, as it is known, had built up trust over decades of working with hospitals and state health departments. Administrators were reluctant to make the switch.

“People — especially in public health and clinical health — are very protective of their data, so that trust factor is certainly an issue,” said Patina Zarcone, the director of informatics for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “The fear of having their data leaked or misused or used for a purpose that they weren’t aware of or agreed to — I think that’s the biggest rub.”

Oakley said the CDC’s system was “not designed for use in a disaster response” and could not adapt quickly in a crisis. Allies of the CDC say withholding taxpayer dollars from the CARES Act in lieu of cooperation was an inappropriate effort to push hospitals into a system they were reluctant to use.

“It’s an absolutely enormous lever,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “It’s a compulsion to oblige institutions to report to this TeleTracking system because they knew if it weren’t tied to money, it wouldn’t happen.”

The Pittsburgh company has no obvious ties to the Trump administration. Rather, the push appears to be part of a broader privatization. HHS has also asked Minnesota-based manufacturer 3M “to create, and continuously update, a nationwide clinical data set on COVID-19 treatment,” according to documents obtained by the Times.

The effort is separate from the TeleTracking data collection. Tim Post, a company spokesman, said that because 3M already operates hospital information systems, it is “uniquely positioned,” with the permission of its clients, to submit information to the Health Department to help officials study disease patterns and recommend treatment options.

Some experts say this kind of cooperation with the private sector is long overdue. But the push also appears to be driven at least in part by an intensifying rift between the CDC, based in Atlanta, and officials at the White House and HHS, the parent agency of the disease control centers.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, have taken a dim view of the CDC and believe its reporting systems were inadequate. In a recent interview, Michael Caputo, the spokesman for Azar, accused the CDC of having “a tantrum.”

Accurate hospital data — including information about coronavirus caseloads, deaths, bed capacity and personal protective equipment — is essential to tracking the pandemic and guiding government decisions about how to distribute scarce resources, like ventilators and the drug remdesivir, the only approved treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

The health agency has set up a new database, HHS Protect, to collect and analyze COVID-19 data from a range of sources. TeleTracking feeds hospital data to that system.

But the public rollout of HHS Protect has been rocky. The nonpartisan COVID Tracking Project identified big disparities between hospital data reported by states and the federal government and deemed the federal data “unreliable.”

The tension dates to March, when the novel coronavirus was making its first surge in the United States.

On March 29, Vice President Mike Pence, charged by Trump with overseeing the federal response, informed hospital administrators that the CDC was setting up a “COVID-19 Module,” and asked them to file daily reports which, he said, were “necessary in monitoring the spread of severe COVID-19 illness and death as well as the impact to hospitals.”

But around that time, TeleTracking submitted a proposal for data collection to the Trump administration, through an initiative, ASPR Next, created to promote innovation. On April 10, TeleTracking was awarded its contract.

The Health Department’s spokeswoman said the intent was to complement the CDC, not compete with it. Like the CDC’s network, TeleTracking’s system requires manual reporting on a daily basis. But in June, Murray demanded the administration provide more information about what she called a “multimillion-dollar contract” for a “duplicative health data system.”

Some hospital officials also objected to the change.

“We have been directing our hospitals to NHSN,” Jackie Gatz, a vice president of the Missouri Hospital Association, wrote to a regional health and human services official in an email obtained by the Times, “and now this email with a much greater carrot — CARES Act distributions — is routing them to TeleTracking.”

When the order was delivered, flaws had already emerged in the new system.

“HHS has acknowledged long wait times for those calling for technical support, and indicated that TeleTracking recently added 100 staff to respond to call center requests,” the American Hospital Association wrote to its members in a “special bulletin” on April 23. “They also are directing hospitals to leave a message if they are unable to reach someone live."

At the time, hospitals had the option of making their daily coronavirus reports to TeleTracking or the CDC. Few were using the new database.

In June, the administration again used a stick to demand that hospitals report to TeleTracking, this time in order to obtain remdesivir. By July, with Birx pushing to bolster hospital compliance, the administration instructed hospitals to stop filing daily reports to the CDC and to send them to TeleTracking instead.

One official at a major academic hospital, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering officials in Washington, said the switch left her “unable to sleep at night.”

“Ethically, it felt like they had taken a very trusted institution in the CDC and all of that trust built up with many public health people,” she said, then “moved it onto a politically and financially motivated portion of this response.”

HHS officials say the government now has a much more complete picture of hospital bed capacity, with more than 90% of hospitals reporting. But Dr. Janis M. Orlowski, the chief health officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, who worked with Birx and the administration to bolster hospital reporting, said that she was “stunned” by the switch and that the increase in reporting came because of efforts by her group and others, not the TeleTracking system.

Orlowski said the data and maps now published on the administration’s HHS Protect data hub are “just not as sophisticated as the CDC.”

The switch also generated pushback inside the CDC, where officials have refused to analyze and publish TeleTracking data, saying they could not be assured of its quality and had continuing questions about its accuracy, according to a senior federal health official.

Administration officials say the CDC is working with a little-known office in the executive branch — the United States Digital Service — to build a “modernized automation process” in which data will continue to flow directly to the HHS. But the project is in it infancy, one senior federal health official said.

Critics say that if the department believed the CDC’s health network had problems, those should have been fixed.

“We have a public health system that depends upon communication from hospitals to state health departments to the CDC,” said Schaffner, the Vanderbilt University infectious disease expert. “It’s very well established. Can it be improved? Of course. But to cut out the public health infrastructure and report to a private firm essential public health data is misguided in the extreme.”

This article originally appeared in   The New York Times .





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Tessylo
Professor Principal
1  seeder  Tessylo    4 years ago

The Trump administration tied billions of dollars in badly needed coronavirus medical funding this spring to hospitals’ cooperation with a private vendor collecting data for a new COVID-19 database that bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The highly unusual demand, aimed at hospitals in coronavirus hot spots using funds passed by Congress with no preconditions, alarmed some hospital administrators and even some federal health officials.

The office of the health secretary, Alex Azar, laid out the requirement in an April 21 email obtained by The New York Times that instructed hospitals to make a one-time report of their COVID-19 admissions and intensive care unit beds to TeleTracking Technologies, a company in Pittsburgh whose $10.2 million, five-month government contract has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

“Please be aware that submitting this data will inform the decision-making on targeted Relief Fund payments and is a prerequisite to payment,” the message read.

The financial condition, which has not been previously reported, applied to money from a $100 billion “coronavirus provider relief fund” established by Congress as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27. Two days later, the administration instructed hospitals to make daily reports to the CDC, only to change course.

“Another data reporting ask,” a regional official in the Health Department informed colleagues in an email exchange obtained by the Times, adding: “It comes with $$ incentive. We really need a consolidated message on the reporting/data requests, this is past ridiculous.”

A colleague replied, “Another wrinkle. What a mess.”

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
2  seeder  Tessylo    4 years ago

“HHS has acknowledged long wait times for those calling for technical support, and indicated that TeleTracking recently added 100 staff to respond to call center requests,” the American Hospital Association wrote to its members in a “special bulletin” on April 23. “They also are directing hospitals to leave a message if they are unable to reach someone live."

At the time, hospitals had the option of making their daily coronavirus reports to TeleTracking or the CDC. Few were using the new database.

In June, the administration again used a stick to demand that hospitals report to TeleTracking, this time in order to obtain remdesivir. By July, with Birx pushing to bolster hospital compliance, the administration instructed hospitals to stop filing daily reports to the CDC and to send them to TeleTracking instead.

One official at a major academic hospital, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering officials in Washington, said the switch left her “unable to sleep at night.”

“Ethically, it felt like they had taken a very trusted institution in the CDC and all of that trust built up with many public health people,” she said, then “moved it onto a politically and financially motivated portion of this response.”

 
 
 
FLYNAVY1
Professor Participates
3  FLYNAVY1    4 years ago

Should any of us be surprised?

Think we should follow the money.....?

 
 
 
Sister Mary Agnes Ample Bottom
Professor Guide
3.1  Sister Mary Agnes Ample Bottom  replied to  FLYNAVY1 @3    4 years ago
Think we should follow the money.....?

My God.  I'm watching his acceptance speech right now.  What a lying sack of garbage.  

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Sister Mary Agnes Ample Bottom @3.1    4 years ago

I second your thoughts. Literally a few seconds after the nominating vote finished he was on a stage lying.  It was nauseating but what else is new? 

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
4  seeder  Tessylo    4 years ago

tRumpsters have been getting punked for over four years now.  

 
 
 
PJ
Masters Quiet
5  PJ    4 years ago

This stinks of future health and life insurance coverage abuses.  "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Principal
5.1  seeder  Tessylo  replied to  PJ @5    4 years ago

No good intentions here.

 
 
 
TᵢG
Professor Principal
6  TᵢG    4 years ago

YMCA?  LOL

All that is left of artists allowing their songs is The Village People?

Also, ironically, I wonder if those attending and watching this realize the implication of the lyrics of that song.   jrSmiley_100_smiley_image.jpg

 
 
 
Snuffy
Professor Participates
7  Snuffy    4 years ago

This isn't the first time that the federal government has tied conditions to federal monies, just search on what states had to (and must continue to do) in order to receive highway money. 

 
 

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