Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-1st dist.) joined Democratic Reps. Scott Peters, Lucy McBath and Anna G. Eshoo to introduce the Health STATISTICS Act of 2020, designed to improve COVID-19 research by fixing inconsistencies in data collection and reporting to effectively combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States has yet to standardize national, state, county or city-level public reporting on COVID-19, providing experts only 40 percent of the data needed to fight the pandemic.
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden has said that, without standardization across all 50 states, the assembly and utilization of data from sources such as public health departments, labs, clinics and hospitals is nearly impossible. It also means reporting statistics like patient demographics or turnaround times for test results are not compulsory.
The Health STATISTICS Act would streamline reporting requirements, enforce coordination between federal and state agencies and help boost data infrastructure in regions that need it. Specifically, the bill would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to share health data collected from reporting entities with the CDC, other public health agencies and the public while preserving individual privacy. It would require the Secretary of HHS, acting through the CDC, to designate data and technology standards and set common reporting criteria for the highest-priority data elements as well as create a grant program for state, local, tribal and territorial public health departments for the expansion and modernization of public health data systems.
“In order to bolster our state and local public health professionals’ efforts to combat COVID-19 and future outbreaks, we need to improve standardized interagency data sharing between our federal agencies and states while optimizing our nation’s public health surveillance system,” Fitzpatrick said. “The bipartisan Health STATISTICS Act will help achieve better patient outcomes and will save more lives by providing researchers with better access to higher-quality data and would modernize our nation’s data infrastructure so that our public health infrastructure can meet immediate surveillance, reporting and other outbreak management needs.”
