A federal inspector discovered that the Department of Defense’s (DoD) office in charge of military health programs may have relied on “inaccurate and potentially misleading” data when making remarks to Congress as a result of a contractor’s careless handling of COVID-19 data.
In a report published on July 11, the DoD Inspector General discovered that the contractor, who was not specifically named, probably fell short of the 90% accuracy standard the Defense Health Agency (DHA) demanded when transferring data from individual health records to a searchable database and selectively selected samples to verify as accurate. As a result, it’s possible that Congress was deceived about COVID-19 in the military, and military medical professionals and policymakers incorrectly interpreted the data in order to make recommendations and establish guidelines.
“The DoD cannot rely on the data in the COVID-19 Registry to make public health and clinical care decisions concerning the COVID-19 pandemic because the data were not complete, accurate, or representative of the universe of DoD patients who had a COVID-19 event,” the document said.
- The Department of Defense (DoD) developed a registry of COVID-19 patient data in the military that was “inaccurate and potentially misleading,” because of a contractor’s sloppy recording, the agency’s internal watchdog found.
- Research, therapy, and informational answers to Congress are supported by information from the COVID-19 registry.
- The Defense Health Agency called the patient registry “a critical component to the fight against the COVID pandemic,” in a 2021 social media statement.
DoD defined a “COVID-19 event” as a positive test result, or when a health care provider required a patient to isolate or be hospitalized due to COVID-19 symptoms.
According to the report, it was meant to provide a representative snapshot of all patients registered in the military health system who experienced a COVID-19 event in order to guide treatment choices. The register would be used by the DoD to respond to information requests from stakeholders, such as members of Congress.
“Any data from the COVID-19 Registry that [Joint Trauma System] officials provided to the DoD and other stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic are inaccurate and potentially misleading,” the IG continued.
Authorized users can also access the registry via an online dashboard, which gives them the option to filter for particular characteristics like the “number of patients that received certain treatments,” according to the IG. That data could be used by DoD healthcare professionals to help them make decisions about their patients’ care and monitor the course of the illness.
However, DoD also intended to use registry data for more extensive objectives, such as pandemic response and wartime readiness testing, according to Gil Cisneros, the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, who spoke to Congress in a report’s introduction in December 2021.
“Without complete, accurate, and representative data, the DHA may not accomplish this goal,” the IG wrote.
DHA is “addressing any misunderstanding concerning the inclusion criteria for the registry and/or the relationship between the two levels of detail within the registry” a spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Since it lacked an automatic method for transferring the volume of data between systems, DHA engaged a contractor to extract data from medical records and add it to the registry while manually checking for quality compliance.
The Daily Caller News Foundation was able to link award identifying numbers from the IG report to awards issued to Hawaii-based Po’Oklela Solutions even though the IG report did not name the contractor.
Po’Okela is part of the Alaka’ina Foundation Family of Companies, which describes itself as “comprised of industry-recognized government service firms who are designated as Native Hawaiian Organization (NHO)-Owned and fall into the respective categories of Small Business, 8(a) certified Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB), and [Historically Underutilized Business] Zone.”
For the abstracted data, DHA required a 90% accuracy rate. 24 of the 25 health records that the IG examined did, however, include mistakes.
The contractor’s quality compliance nurses chose the records to review based on their judgment rather than at random, and when they checked the records for accuracy, they did not accurately record the results, the IG found. The IG discovered inaccuracies in all 10 of the documents the contractor verified, such as one record that omitted to list “high cholesterol” as a previous ailment.
According to the IG, Po’Okela may be responsible for paying $6.2 million in charges for support services that weren’t accurate enough. According to records, the DoD granted Po’Okela a second contract for the same services, which will expire in September.
According to Cisneros, the DHA had added more than 227,000 cases to the repository as of May 2021. DoD intended to keep growing the registry.
The IG discovered that at least 7,213 patients with a COVID-19 incident were never ever considered for registration in the register.
The IG also discovered that the records selection did not correspond to the intended audience. The registry should provide a similar hospitalization rate if, for instance, 1% of DoD COVID-19 patients required hospitalization. Despite the fact that precise figures were deleted in the public version, it appears that the IG discovered a difference between the two in hospitalization rates.
“Those who were inpatients or had additional risk factors had additional details collected by manual chart abstraction that were not available through automated data feeds. Those patients who conducted home COVID tests and some who were tested outside of a military hospital or clinic may not have been identified by the registry,” DHA told the DCNF.
According to a Government Accountability Office report dated 2021 states that as part of its COVID-19 reaction, DoD started conducting or funding a number of complementary research initiatives in 2020.
The report omitted information on how often the registry was used in these studies by the researchers. However, it was emphasized that the registry was made to “support civilian research and medical teams who seek insights to future advancements in vaccines and therapeutics.” The registry was also made to assist in evaluating the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 treatments.
DHA called the patient registry “a critical component to the fight against the COVID pandemic,” in a 2021 social media statement.
An article from March explaining the agency’s continued use of the registry stated that it contained vaccination data.
“We have full confidence in the registry data and continue to work with the DoD IG to resolve any misunderstandings,” the DHA spokesperson told the DCNF, noting that the agency is working on ways to improve accuracy of the data.
Po’Okela Solutions has yet to respond for comment at the time of writing this article.
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