In December, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will finally regain control of national COVID-19 hospital data — which the agency abruptly lost early in the pandemic to an inexperienced private company with ties to then-President Donald Trump.
As SARS-CoV-2 raged in the summer of 2020, the Trump administration was busily sabotaging the once preeminent public health agency. The government’s meddling included stripping the CDC of its power to collect critical data on COVID-19 patients and pandemic resources at hospitals across the country.
According to multiple investigative reports at the time, then-White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx was frustrated by the CDC’s slow and somewhat messy process in collecting and cleaning up the data submitted by thousands of hospitals. The data includes statistics on admissions, patient demographics, bed availability, ventilator use, discharge and personal protective equipment (PPE).
The switch
In July 2020, the Trump administration abruptly ordered hospitals to stop reporting all that data to the CDC and instead submit it to a new database operated by Pittsburgh-based software company TeleTracking Technologies. The little-known company had won a $10.2 million six-month contract with the federal government, despite having no previous experience setting up such a data collection system. Before the award, the company had won only small contracts with the Department of Veteran Affairs for software that tracked patient status. The $10.2 million pandemic-era grant was more than twenty times greater than all of the company’s previous government grants combined.
The move soon drew questions and concerns from journalists and lawmakers. An investigation by NPR detailed irregularities in how TeleTracking won the contract. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services initially said it was a no-bid contract — meaning companies made no competing proposals to do the job — only to backtrack and say there was competition. The department clarified that the contract was won through a competitive, low-stakes process called a ‘Broad Agency Announcement’, a process commonly used for innovative research rather than database creation.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for TeleTracking co-CEO Michael Zamagias told NPR that the company won the contract after HHS contacted the company directly by phone. NPR also noted that Zamagias was a longtime Republican donor previously in the real estate industry. In particular, he had personal ties to a Manhattan-based real estate financing firm, Cooper-Horowitz, which worked extensively with the Trump Organization. Neal Cooper, whose father was a partner in the company, was closely mentored by Zamagias. Cooper told NPR that “we’ve done a lot of business with… [Trump]billions of dollars worth of business.”
End of an era
When Trump administration officials broke the news to the CDC that TeleTracking was taking over, the staffers knew immediately that the transfer would be a disaster, according to an investigative report from Science. A CDC employee left the announcement meeting to sob. Others were outraged. “Birx is waging a months-long frenzy against our data,” a CDC employee texted a colleague shortly after the meeting. “Good luck that the hospitals are cleaning and updating their data on a daily basis.”
The CDC staff were rightly pessimistic. The transition to the new system was chaotic due to technical and administrative problems. Hospitals complained that they did not have enough time to prepare and that they faced frustrating technical problems that required intensive resources at a time when they were inundated with patients. The result was unreliable data amid a public health crisis.
“We went dark as we got close to our previous peak,” Dave Dillon, vice president of media and public relations for the Missouri Hospital Association, told Healthcare IT News at the time. “Moving off a known platform that all individuals can easily manipulate … has damaged our ability to have that situational awareness.”
Nevertheless, TeleTracking’s contract has been continuously renewed since then and the company has earned over $50 million. Now that is coming to an end. The last contract expires on December 31 and will not be renewed. Hospitals will resubmit their data to the CDC beginning in mid-December, according to a leaked email seen by Bloomberg News.
“This change is both a surprise and a disappointment to us,” Christopher Johnson, president and co-CEO of TeleTracking, told Bloomberg. Johnson added that the company will work to make the transition smooth.
The move follows current CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s emphasis on modernizing the CDC’s data collection. On August 1, the federal government issued a final rule outlining new measures for the data collection system. Some hospitals have called the switch “disruptive,” Bloomberg noted, but overall it appears to be a rare win for the CDC, which has been criticized amid the pandemic.
