COVID-19 tests are going unused due to hospital IT challenges

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Testing is one of the most important tools for getting the coronavirus pandemic under control in the United States. More than 160,000 COVID-19 tests were performed in the US on Thursday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But there's good reason to believe that there are still many people with the virus who have not been tested. More testing would help guide treatment and quarantine decisions and give government officials more data about the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak.

At the same time, a Nature investigation has revealed that a number of academic labs capable of performing COVID-19 tests are operating well below capacity. Nature's reporting suggests that incompatible IT systems are significant reasons for this mismatch.

Many hospitals are used to working with large commercial labs that have the software necessary to interface with a hospital's electronic health records and billing systems. When an academic lab shows up with the capacity to run tests but not the infrastructure to interface with hospital systems, hospitals are often reluctant to do business with them.

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