KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The federal government's new COVID-19 hospital reporting system went live this week.
It requires hospitals to report data to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The new system is causing concern among public health experts.
Dave Dillon, spokesperson for the Missouri Hospitals Association said switching over to a new reporting system with less than two days' notice is causing chaos among hospitals.
"There was no on-boarding, there was only a timeline," Dillon said.
Dillon said the new system could be beneficial in the long run, but right now it could have negative effects on the country's COVID-19 response.
"It creates an absence of situational awareness at the state level so state resources can't be directed in a meaningful way, backed by data to support those communities that are getting hit hardest," Dillon said.
Since the new system went live, Dillon said it has created a troubling week-long gap in data for the MHA at a time when the state was seeing an increase in cases.
Dr. David Wild, vice president of Performance Improvement for the University of Kansas Health System, said data reported to the CDC was traditionally available to researchers and epidemiologists, but that likely won't be the case with the new HHS system.
"That same level of access is not possible right now with the change to HHS and we've made the case that that needs to be true no mater what, but at this point there's still a significant concern," Wild said.
Dillon said the biggest frustration among hospitals is the change coming mid-stream, leaving hospitals scrambling at the height of a global pandemic.
"You can't expect that hospitals are going to be able to move that quickly to do this, and you're doing it at the same time where truly lives are hanging in the balance of resource allocation and or public policy changes," Dillon said.
