What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Real World Data

Due to the urgent need to characterize and track the spread of COVID-19, good healthcare data have been highly sought after since the beginning of the pandemic. Such data enable the rapid assessments of the capacity of healthcare facilities as well as the trajectory and outcomes of patients admitted to those facilities. However, the US healthcare system has had profound difficulty responding to these needs. This has revealed weaknesses in how healthcare data are gathered, shared, and analyzed. UCSF’s Dr. Laura Esserman said, “Our current electronic health records are not organized for quality improvement and you shouldn’t have to go to the IRB to get permission to collect the data that allows you to do your job.“ To find out more about how RWD can be better leveraged in the fight against COVID-19 click here.

(Source: David Shaywitz, Tinneman Report, October 8, 2020)