The effort to report the effects of the coronavirus by Texas state healthcare authorities has been riddled with errors because of an outdated electronic system. The interface, National Electronic Disease Surveillance System, or NEDSS has been a topic of debate between Texas’s public health and lawmakers for years. Money had been assigned to the update of the system in 2019 but the installation has only began when the coronavirus pandemic struck.
The state was forced to utilize an antiquated system that didn’t have the capacity to track and trace the amount of coronavirus cases, many days over 60,000 being reported. The state of Texas chose to hire a third-party contractor to build a separate program to manage the pandemic reporting that wasn’t ready until late May.
During a pandemic or any other vast-spreading disease or virus circumstance, healthcare professionals such as epidemiologists rely on real-time reporting that is as quick as it is reliable. NEDSS was neither quick nor reliable as professionals attempted to use it to prevent the spread of the virus by intervention through data-driven decisions. However, it was last updated in August and now is operating at a usable capacity.
The failed pandemic response has called attention to the dire need to overhaul and upgrade the reporting systems of state health-care systems across the nation. In Texas, for instance, the public health sector is decentralized which has led to underfunding of electronic data management. The state has had to backtrack their reporting numbers, admitting to errors and backlogs of important data such as death counts.
To add to inaccuracy of data, the process of reporting new cases and death has also be identified as broken and unplanned. The coronavirus brought new components to the mix because of the need to include nursing homes and long-term care facilities. State officials report constant duplicate case information and missing data. In some scenarios the same infection or death was reported by a hospital, laboratory and nursing home.
State health-care officials report hand-sifting through duplicates, manually copying information across various systems, and working to organize a barrage of paper faxes. Texas spends less per capita on their healthcare funding than 39 other states which has led to doctors, hospitals and labs relying on fax communication.
Many counties have seen an exodus of employees, some as much as 60% of their staff have quit or found other employment. This has led to the state government utilizes employees whose roll falls outside of this scope, such as nutritionists, in the uphill task of sorting through the date in hopes of reliable and up-to-date reporting.
The response by healthcare officials is the request for $1 billion to the CDC to upgrade the public health surveillance systems. There is a desperate call from state healthcare leaders for an entirely new approach to the reporting process, another upgrade to NEDESS, and a promise to earmark funding for the state’s healthcare system as a whole over the next few years.