The Controversial Birth of HHS Protect

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been gathering data about COVID-19 patients via its National Healthcare Safety Network throughout the course of the current pandemic and has historically been the primary federal source of data collection for infectious disease outbreaks in the United States. According to the New York Times, this data includes “daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.”

On July 10, 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and send data directly to a new HHS website. That new website is called HHS Protect and went live on Monday, July 20, 2020.

This move was met with skepticism by critics of the current administration for 2 main reasons. The first reason is that CDC has refined its data collection methods over many years, whereas the implementation of a new data collection system is felt to be a risky move in the middle of a pandemic. The other concern is related to fear of a reduction in transparency regarding the data, especially when the question of whether to reopen businesses and schools should largely be answered based on reliable data.

As a result, more than 100 industry groups signed a letter asking Vice President Pence, Ambassador Birx and HHS Secretary Azar to reverse its decision to bypass the CDC for the collection and analysis of COVID-19 patient data. The American Medical Informatics Association also published an open letter stating similar concerns. The folks running the COVID Symptom Study are pleading to its voluntary users to keep using the app to help detect new COVID-19 cases earlier, stating concerns about possible lack of transparency with HHS Protect.

I doubt that HHS will reverse course, so official hospital reporting will now be channeled through HHS Protect. According to the HHS order, options for data submission include:

1. Submission through one’s state
2. Submission via TeleTracking
3. Authorization of one’s health IT vendor
4. Publication to the hospital website in a standardized format (pending implementation)

HHS Protect currently includes a limited number of data visualizations but also provides access to a downloadable dataset through HealthData.gov.