Officials working on the Trump administration’s data collection efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic have suggested to transition officials for President-elect Joe Biden that the new team get rid of a newly minted system originally designed by the Silicon Valley company Palantir, warning that it is not accurate.
Palantir, the data-mining firm created by investor Peter Thiel, a close ally of President Donald Trump, is known for its work with global intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies. It secured a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last year to help the federal government develop a better system—HHS Protect— to track how hospitals across the country were handling the surge in COVID-19 cases. The system tracks hospitals’ supplies, cases, and testing, among other things. Sources familiar with the design previously told The Daily Beast that Palantir’s data suites were one of the primary tools used to develop the platform.
For months, Vice President Mike Pence has hailed the new HHS system as revolutionary, telling the nation’s governors on several different calls, recordings of which were obtained by The Daily Beast, that the federal government had the ability to see exactly what hospitals needed in real time, including detailed information on personal protective equipment, admissions, the availability of ICU beds, drugs and other medical supplies, as well as testing capacity. As recently as this week, the HHS system began reporting which locations throughout the country had received shipments of monoclonal antibody therapeutics.
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But three officials who work with the HHS Protect system tell The Daily Beast that it is unreliable and lacks the ability to update critical information the federal government needs to better assist communities across the country. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and HHS have suggested in materials shared with the Biden transition and in briefings with transition officials that the new administration scrap HHS Protect and revert back to the prior CDC data collection system known as the National Healthcare Safety Network’s COVID-19 module, according to three individuals familiar with those conversations. HHS and the CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
“The system had problems from the very beginning. It never functioned in the way we thought it was going to,” said one official who works with the data. “We should be doing more with the data that’s out there. But the system doesn’t allow us to do that because it isn’t accurate.”
Part of the problem with HHS Protect, officials said, is that the system bypasses the normal communication channel that used to exist between the CDC and local health departments. Instead, hospitals were required in the summer to start entering their information manually through TeleTracking, a private contractor that received a bid from HHS to help develop the HHS Protect system. But not every institution complied and there was no local oversight body to ensure the process was handled correctly, officials said. A recent report by Science magazine said state data collected by health departments and HHS Protect data differ by up to 20 percent.
The system was so fraught with errors and complications that the congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus, the main oversight body for the federal government’s handling of the pandemic, launched an investigation in July into the sudden change in data collection. Leaders of the committee sent a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and the CDC Director Robert Redfield demanding the administration reverse the decision to divert coronavirus data away from the CDC. The congressional investigation is still ongoing, according to a Democratic aide familiar with the probe.
HHS officials say the HHS Protect data integration platform was developed in part because the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up so quickly that demand grew for a system that more efficiently and cohesively collected and analyzed various streams of data.
The goal was to have a system that state and federal officials, from dozens of agencies, could access to better understand how the virus was spreading and how to manage its impact on the American people.
HHS Protect was also designed in part to help local officials make decisions about reopening their communities. Officials said the system drew on existing CDC data collection methods, primarily from existing longterm care modules, as well as data from hospital surveillance systems and a slew of other state and local sources.
Although the CDC had added a new COVID-19 model to the National Healthcare Safety Network—the nation’s most widely-used infection tracking system—a decision was made “at the highest levels” this summer to instead begin using TeleTracking to input data for HHS Protect. CDC officials still have complete access to HHS Protect, senior HHS officials said, and the ability to update data.
If the recommendations are accepted, the change in data collection would come at a time when Biden is already in the midst of mapping out other drastic changes to how the federal government responds to COVID-19.
The president-elect has already said he would significantly speed up the vaccine distribution by widening the recommendations for who should get the shot and when. And on Thursday Biden released his $1.9 million COVID-19 plan, which calls for direct payments of $1,400 to most Americans, $350 billion in state and local aid, $50 billion toward COVID-19 testing and an additional $20 billion for a national vaccine program with state and local governments.
The switch back to the National Healthcare Safety Network data system would come at a crucial time, officials said, particularly because several regions throughout the country are experiencing a spike in COVID cases and related deaths as a result of the holidays. Clear, accurate data is required to ensure hospitals have what they need to get through this surge.
On Tuesday the U.S. hit a new daily death toll record of nearly 4,500, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
