How faxes and email are slowing the U.S. COVID-19 response

You’d hardly know the U.S. invented the internet by the way its public health agencies are collecting vital pandemic data.

While health-care industry record-keeping is now mostly electronic, cash-strapped state and local health departments still rely heavily on faxes, email and spreadsheets to gather infectious disease data and share it with federal authorities. The data dysfunction hamstrings the nation’s coronavirus response, including in tracing people potentially exposed to the virus.

In April, the Trump administration set up a parallel reporting system run by the Silicon Valley data-wrangling firm Palantir. Duplicating many data requests, it placed new burdens on front-line workers at hospitals, labs and clinics already reporting case and testing data to public health agencies. There’s little evidence the Palantir system has measurably improved federal or state response to COVID-19.

Emails exchanged between Nevada officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March and early April, obtained by The Associated Press in a public records request, lay bare disease-reporting bottlenecks. It sometimes takes multiple days to track down patients' addresses and phone numbers. Data vital to case investigations such as patient travel and medical histories is missing.

None of this is news to the CDC or other health experts.

“We are woefully behind,” the CDC’s No. 2 official, Anne Schuchat, wrote in a September report on public health data technology, likening the state of U.S. public health technology to “puttering along the data superhighway in our Model T Ford.”

Most hospitals and other health care providers have long since ditched paper files for electronic health records that are easily shared within the industry.

But data collection for...