EHR Association

capabilities in normal and emergency operations. Second, the need for access to supplemental data housed outside hospitals, physicians’ offices and other provider organizations must be addressed. Specifically, the focus should be on establishing effective integration between public health systems that track related data, as well as the processes and infrastructure to identify, implement, and deploy data-gathering methods to expediently follow up with impacted populations and individuals. The outcome of these recommendations will be smoother data sharing and an alignment of overall data requirements. This will, in turn, allow for a better understanding of who needs what, while also streamlining the approach to public health reporting – both for daily operations and emergency response. This includes not only reporting from providers to public health agencies, but also public health agencies to providers and consumers. A governance structure that includes a surge process and associated infrastructure to respond to an emergency should also be established, with involvement of all stakeholders and impacted individuals as early in the process as possible. Data must be right-sized to ensure access to the minimum information necessary for the situation at hand, which will protect patient privacy without sacrificing emergency response. Finally, a national strategy for patient identification should be explored. The issues resulting from patient misidentification during the pandemic were significant and created serious challenges for providers and public health entities seeking to track population size and treatment within or across jurisdictions. Health Equity and SDOH While not a new challenge to the health of our nation’s citizens, the COVID-19 pandemic shone