• A registry of military COVID-19 patient data created by the Department of Defense (DOD) was “inaccurate and potentially misleading” due to sloppy recording by contractors, the Pentagon’s internal oversight agency said.
• Data from the COVID-19 Registry will support research, treatment, and the information response to Congress.
• The Defense and Health Agency called the Patient Registry “an important factor in the fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic,‘ said in a social media statement in 2021.

Poor handling of COVID-19 data by contractors may have caused the Department of Defense (DOD) agency that oversees the military’s health program to base policies and statements to Congress on “inaccurate and potentially misleading” data, a government oversight agency investigation found.

The contractor was not directly identified, but likely failed to meet the 90% accuracy standard required by the Defense Health Agency (DHA) when moving information from personal health records to searchable data. database, The Pentagon inspector general said in a report that the samples were handpicked to verify accuracy. Posted July 11th. As a result, Congress may have been misinformed about COVID-19 in the military, and military doctors and policymakers misinterpreted the data to make recommendations and regulations.

“The Department of Defense cannot rely on data from the COVID-19 Registry to make public health or clinical care decisions related to the COVID-19 pandemic because the data are neither complete nor accurate nor representative of the entire DoD patient population affected by COVID-19,” the document states.

The Department of Defense has defined a “COVID-19 event” as a positive test result or when a healthcare provider requests isolation or hospitalization of a patient due to COVID-19 symptoms.

The purpose, according to the report, was to provide a representative snapshot of all patients enrolled in the military’s medical system with COVID-19 to inform treatment decisions. The Department of Defense will use the registry to provide information upon request from stakeholders, including members of Congress.

“Any data from the COVID-19 Registry is [Joint Trauma System] Officials provided to the Department of Defense and other parties during the COVID-19 pandemic are inaccurate and potentially misleading,” IG continued. (Related: Note showing extensive treatment, surgery, and exceptions for taxpayer-funded transgender military personnel)

Authorized users can also access the registry through an online dashboard, which can be filtered by specific characteristics such as “number of patients receiving a particular treatment,” IG said. DOD healthcare providers can use the information to guide patient treatment decisions and track disease progression.

But the Department of Defense also plans to analyze data in the registry for larger purposes, such as pandemic response and wartime readiness testing, Gil Cisneros, Under Secretary of Defense for Human Resources and Readiness, told lawmakers in a December 2021 introduction to a report on the registry.

“Without complete, accurate and representative data, the DHA may not reach this goal,” the IG wrote.

The DHA is “addressing misunderstandings regarding the registry’s inclusion criteria and/or the relationship between two levels of detail within the registry,” a spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Lacking an automated process to convert large amounts of data from one system to another, DHA hired contractors to extract information from medical records into the registry and manually verify quality compliance.

IG’s report did not reveal the name of the contractor, but did provide the original contract and follow-up prize identification numbers, which the Daily Caller News Foundation matched to the prize. Given the To Hawaii-based Po’Oklela Solutions.

Pookera is part of the Arakaina Foundation family of companies. explain itself “Consists of industry recognized government service companies designated as Native Hawaiian Organization (NHO) owned and classified into the respective categories of Small Business, 8(a) Certified Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB), [Historically Underutilized Business] zone. “

DHA mandated 90% accuracy for abstracted data. However, of the 25 health records reviewed by the IG, 24 were incorrect. ”

The IG found that contractor quality compliance nurses did not accurately record results when selecting records for review based on opinion rather than randomly selecting records for review and assessing record accuracy. Of her 10 records verified by contractors, IG found errors in all of them. For example, a record did not include “high cholesterol” as a pre-existing condition.

IG said Pookera could be paid $6.2 million for support services that fall short of accuracy standards.The Department of Defense awarded Pookera a second contract for the service, which expires in September, according to records. show.

As of May 2021, the DHA had more than 227,000 cases in its repository, Cisneros said. The Department of Defense plans to continue expanding the registry.

Early in the pandemic, EIDS collected COVID-19 patient data, including data related to vaccination. #MHS GENESIS and all related legacy systems. The data is updated at least daily and @CDCgov every day. pic.twitter.com/RKCLn93XBh

— PEO DHMS (@DoD_EHR) January 13, 2021

At least 7,213 COVID-19 patients were excluded from the pipeline to be initially enrolled, IG found.

In addition, the IG found that the selection of records was also inconsistent with the target population. For example, if his 1% of Department of Defense COVID-19 patients were hospitalized, the registry should show a similar hospitalization rate. IG seems to have found a discrepancy between the two in terms of hospitalization rates, but the specific numbers have been redacted in the public version.

“For hospitalized patients and those with additional risk factors, manual graph abstraction collected additional details that were not available in automated data feeds. Patients who underwent COVID-19 testing at home and some patients who were tested outside military hospitals and clinics may not have been identified in the registry,” the DHA told DCNF.

The Department of Defense conducted or funded a number of complementary research studies as part of the COVID-19 response beginning in 2020. according to From 2021 on the report of the Government Accountability Office.

The report did not elaborate on the extent to which the researchers used the registry in these studies. However, it noted that the registry was designed to help assess the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 treatments and to “support private research and medical teams seeking insight into future advances in vaccines and treatments.”

The DHA maintains a patient registry as “an important factor in the fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic,2021 social media statement.

Vaccination data were also included. according to In a March article discussing the continued use of the registry by government agencies.

“We have full confidence in the registry data and will continue to work with the Department of Defense to resolve any misunderstandings,” a DHA spokesperson told the DCNF, noting that the agency is working on ways to improve the accuracy of the data.

Pookera Solutions did not immediately respond to DCNF’s request for comment.

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