Many hospitals have overcome the challenges to generate covid-19 patient
data to support research. However, there are additional challenges to
use hospital patient data for covid-19 surveillance, monitoring and
planning. Chief among the challenges is a lack of infrastructure to
connect hospital information systems with public health information
systems. Instead, public health staff update their public health
information line list with patient hospital through a laborious process
of phone calls or searches in hospital information systems to which
they’ve been granted access.