The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the US healthcare system in unprecedented ways, highlighting the importance of data-informed public health policymaking and healthcare management within and across states.
Under Dr. Fortune’s leadership, HSPH is working together with Siemens Healthineers to explore how diagnostic data collected routinely at high temporal and spatial resolution across the US might be used to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected healthcare systems nationwide. Furthermore, the team is working on building analytical tools that could use such data to alert local and federal public health practitioners of potential healthcare threats in the future.
The initiative is a proving ground for the importance of interdisciplinary partnerships between for- and non-profit organizations in solving some of healthcare’s most pressing problems by putting clinical data at the heart of evidence-based policymaking in public health. The ultimate aim is to ease the increasing burden on the nation’s healthcare systems by combining high-quality data and analytics to facilitate and expedite sound decision making across the sector.