The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is implementing a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) technology to replace the National Health Safety Network (NHSN) for collecting COVID-19 patient data, FedScoop reported Wednesday.
CDC will discontinue its use of NHSN and deploy HHS Protect, which was developed in April and works to collate data from over 225 health systems and 20 state health departments.
HHS also procured Pittsburgh-based company TeleTracking Technologies' data management platform to help hospitals directly relay COVID-19 data such as treatments and emerging symptoms to the department.
Robert Redfield, director of CDC, said at a prior call with reporters that the move to HHS Protect will enable the center to mitigate duplication and NHSN to focus on long-term care centers and nursing homes.
“I think the change that you’ll see is when additional data elements are requested by HHS — that we think that we need to understand what’s happening across the United States — we will be asking hospitals to report that data,” noted Jose Arrieta, chief information officer of HHS.
The department also selected Palantir to provide technologies for COVID-19 data analysis and processing.