EHR Systems That Cannot Fully Talk To One Another Reportedly Could Make Tracking Side Effects Of COVID-19 Vaccine Difficult
- October 22, 2020
Bloomberg Law (10/21, Baumann, Subscription Publication) reports, “Electronic health data systems that still can’t fully talk to one another will create challenges flagging side effects of any [COVID-19] vaccine once it hits the market.” The CDC said it plans to improve the functioning of surveillance systems to monitor COVID-19, “but finding long-term safety data on a vaccine that will likely be authorized for some segments of the population after a few months...will require changing the culture of patients and health-care providers who aren’t used to reporting side effects, drug safety experts said.” The HHS “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology for years worked on rules to ensure medical systems were able to communicate with one another,” but “connecting the databases necessary to track the distribution and possible side effects of a [COVID-19] vaccine will pose a significant test of those efforts.”