A senate hearing on the U.S. response to COVID-19 heard testimony from multiple officials on May 12, 2020, including Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
During questioning, Senator Mitt Romney asked Dr. Redfield, “How is it possible in this day and age that the CDC has never established a real-time system with accurate data?” In response, Dr. Redfield admitted, “The reality is there is an archaic system… This nation needs a modern, highly capable data analytic system that can do predictive analysis. I think it’s one of the many shortcomings that have been identified as we went through this outbreak, and I couldn't agree with you more, it’s time to get that corrected.”
CQInsights was founded on the principles of applying Systems and Data Science to actual patient care through Clinical Quality Improvement (CQI) initiatives to lower costs and improve outcomes. In order to accomplish this, CQInsights works with multi-disciplinary teams to gather real-world clinical data—one of the biggest challenges in getting that data is the archaic systems widely used in healthcare.
Bruce Ramshaw, Managing Partner of CQInsights, says, “In healthcare we have a data infrastructure for documentation, coding, and billing to get paid. Why don’t we have a data infrastructure for learning and improving outcomes?”
Electronic Medical Records systems have been built for capturing data, but getting that data out of the systems (even if you’re part of the clinical team that entered the data) is nearly impossible, or it takes large amounts of resources to make it happen. Like Dr. Redfield testified, it’s time to get this corrected.
The C-SPAN clip of the testimony from Dr. Robert Redfield can be found below.