FORT WORTH, Texas — Texas’s COVID-19 data is complex but important. It guides the decisions of doctors, scientists, government leaders and others, but it’s continued to have issues.
“This has been an under-resourced area of public health and reporting,” said chief clinical officer for Christus Health Sam Bagchi.
Christus runs 40 hospitals in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico and had 95,000 of the of the more than half a million tests Texas recently revealed were caught up in a backlog.
That backlog has caused counties to report thousands of cases from as far back as March that they were never aware of.
“Every time we got close to getting them the data the way they wanted it, then they would change the way they needed it,” Bagchi said.
State health officials say Christus sent spreadsheet-style documents that had errors, but Bagchi says the data was fine.
“The state characterized these as coding errors and there weren’t any errors,” he said. “Our data was good.”
He blames the state’s outdated reporting system and says officials are again changing what info they want.
“We were just disappointed to see this issue come out the way it did,” Bagchi said. “That was frustrating to me and to us.”
Texas health officials told WFAA that Christus isn’t alone and the state’s backlog has not been resolved.
Of the roughly 370 testing labs in Texas, officials with the Department of State Health Services say 46 have never been able to report info to the state because of continuing data issues. That includes several hospital groups DSHS didn’t identify.
“We’ve talked to several similarly sized large health systems with multiple markets that are experiencing the same issues and still haven’t cracked the code on them frankly,” Bagchi said.
In a statement, a DSHS official wrote, “DSHS assists labs with identifying formatting issues that prevent the files they are submitting from uploading into the electronic lab reporting system. It often takes several rounds of test file submissions to identify all of the formatting issues.”
DSHS says it can take eight months to set up new labs with its system, so they feel they’re moving quickly. But Christus says it hasn’t had these issues in New Mexico or Louisiana where it also has hospitals.
“We were just never able to get that support from the state prior to the pandemic. They admitted they didn’t have the resources to do that,” Bagchi said.
Christus relies on the state data for its own planning and doesn’t want people to discount what’s on the state’s dashboard. Bagchi says while the positivity rate is suspect, hospitalizations, which are high but slowly trending down, are likely safe to trust.
“Not being able to get those results to state is also worrisome because we want the state also to be able to make decisions on what is actually happening today and not what happened two or three months ago,” he said. “We take data transparency very seriously and it’s important to us.”
The pandemic caught many people off-guard, but 6 months after it began, the state has now hired a data team, updated its system and is still finding issues.
“We’re encouraged that it’s happening even though we wish it hadn’t taken a pandemic to do this,” Bagchi said.