This article was originally published on GovDataDownload and discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of managing data within the healthcare environment. In this article, Lisa Hines, Strategic Advisor for Healthcare at NetApp, explains data’s effectiveness when confronting issues stemming from the pandemic. Through data management, healthcare organizations are able to find solutions and better prepare for the future.
Nearly a year after the U.S. was shut down and quarantined due to the global pandemic, we are seeing progress in developing and distributing a vaccine. Yet, it is not without its challenges. With the light at the end of this long tunnel, one thing is certain for the future of public health: the pandemic has highlighted the need for speed and flexibility when managing data.
The GovDataDownload team recently sat down with Lisa Hines, MBA, former Director of Telehealth Services for the Greenville Health System (now Prisma Health) and current Strategic Advisor for Global Healthcare at NetApp. In a previous interview, Hines told us that, “Data is no good unless we use it.” Now more than ever, data is at the core of addressing this global pandemic. Public and private healthcare agencies, academic research centers, laboratories, and pharmaceutical and life sciences companies have been forced to scale to be capable of ingesting, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of real time data,” Hines told us.
“Every day, more and more technologies and devices create health data that can enable continuous awareness and preparedness,” Hines shared. For example, she pointed to everything from contract tracing, to Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) distribution, to pandemic response centers, and much more. Each of these areas requires access to data and “a holistic, comprehensive data management strategy for using this real-time data set.” Hines told us, “This is fundamental to fighting this epidemic and for public preventive awareness now and in the future.”
Yet, over this past year, the pandemic has shined a bright light on the vulnerabilities of current infrastructure in handling the vast amounts of data available. Many public health officials have expressed concerns over preparedness, training, testing, and how it could impact future pandemics. The lessons learned from COVID-19 have elevated the requirements for modernizing infrastructure, data collection, and management.
According to Governing, state officials are looking to rectify these oversights by increasing funding in public health in the areas of training, vaccine distribution, and IT modernization. One example is Governor Kate Brown from Oregon who is proposing $30 million in public health modernization to “better prepare Oregon’s public health system to respond to events like the current pandemic.” Similarly, other states including Washington and Maine have proposed additional budget dollars to go towards pandemic response and bolstering the public health systems.
This follows the overarching Center of Disease Control (CDC) recommendation of creating a data management strategy. In an effort to move data from the local level to the public health department to the CDC with minimal effort, the agency has developed a strategy to address each stage of data management. Hines explained that this includes everything from collection, utilization of standard terminology, to security and confidentiality, and archival. “Data gathering and sharing are some of the core tenets in responding to COVID-19,” Hines said. The challenge, she said, is to take the mountain of data and get it into the hands of public health officials “to make decisions, interventions, and offer solutions that can save lives.”
Hines noted that these ongoing modernization efforts “aim to promote seamless reporting of clinical and laboratory data, ensure interoperability among core public health surveillance systems, and support cloud migration and access to new data sources.” She emphasized that ultimately, this is all about ensuring a good data management strategy to “enable better health through trusted data.”
This is how NetApp makes a difference, Hines explained. “NetApp software, known as our Data Fabric, provides a consistent way to manage, store, transport, and protect data no matter where it lives in the US or in the world.” NetApp can help bring together multiple data sources from raw research data from vaccine candidates, clinical trials data, safety data, adverse effects data, and study data and accelerate artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, Hines shared.
AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine development is one great example of how NetApp improves data management, and many other healthcare organizations also are realizing the benefits of implementing a data strategy with the flexibility of NetApp’s data fabric.
To learn more about the NetApp Data Fabric click here.
This article was originally published on GovDataDownload on February 5, 2021.
