COVID-19 Tests are Going Unused Due to Hospital IT Challenges
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:
COVID-19 tests are going unused due to hospital IT challenges:
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.
[...] 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.
[...] Nature talked to Fyodor Urnov, who directs a genomics center at the University of California, Berkeley. The organization launched a testing service in late March and began pitching it to hospitals. His lab already has the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification that is required to perform COVID-19 tests.
The tests would have been free to hospitals, funded by private philanthropists. But he still had trouble finding hospitals interested in working with him.
"The business of American medicine and the way it is organized is astonishingly unprepared for this," he told Nature. "I show up in a magic ship, with 20,000 free kits and CLIA and everything, and the major hospitals say: 'Go away, we cannot interface with you.'"
Urnov's lab wound up testing some patients outside the hospital system-including firefighters and homeless people. The non-profit group coordinating these tests doesn't have software compatible with the Berkeley testing service's software, but folks on both sides were willing to do manual data entry to accelerate the testing process.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.