As Coronavirus Strikes, Crucial Data in Electronic Health Records Hard to Harvest

Industry's refusal to adopt common standards blocks critical need for interoperability

Health records can not be easily shared between different systems, making urgent data analysis of COVID-19 difficult or impossible. Tyler Olson/Shutterstock

When President Donald Trump started touting hydroxychloroquine as “one of the biggest game changers” for treating COVID-19, researchers hoped electronic health records could quickly tell them if he was on the right track.

Yet pooling data from the digital records systems in thousands of hospitals has proved a technical nightmare thus far. That’s largely because software built by rival technology firms often cannot retrieve and share information to help doctors judge which coronavirus treatments are helping patients recover.

“I’m stunned at EHR vendors’ inability to consistently pull data from their systems,” said Dale Sanders, chief technology officer of Health Catalyst, a medical data analytics company. “It’s absolutely hampering our ability to understand and react to COVID.”