The Biden administration is reportedly seeking to strengthen the federal COVID-10 tracking system established during the peak of the pandemic to obtain an in-depth record of the impact of respiratory and other diseases on patients and hospital resources.
Sources claim that the plan will build on the existing hospital data collection system developed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
The million-dollar HHS Protect system was developed in the year 2020 by Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House taskforce coordinator during the Trump regime. It soon became an effective central hub for daily clinical information on coronavirus infection and deaths.
Officials admitted that the agency will not be able to quickly adapt its reporting system to collect additional hospital inventory data needed for decision-making, which is why it has asked HHS to cultivate a new system.
For the new program to be successful, hospitals must actively participate by presenting data on patients' pre-existing conditions, vaccination status, ethnicity, and so on for both older and poor Americans. In addition to Covid and Influenza, the government intends to add requirements for nearly 6,200 hospitals, such as the number of patients infected with flu and similar diseases.
Along the same line, the program's top management was transferred to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HHS's lead public health agency, last month.
The program's rules are being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget and are assumed to be published to solicit public feedback on data expansion before they are made official. Meanwhile, some officials have expressed reservations about the proposed changes.
Notably, the CDC has come under fire for mishandling the virus's spread, implying its inability to gather and transparently process COVID-19 data. However, the CDC retaliated claiming that this collaborative effort with HHS will allow them to make data easily available and accessible to the public.
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