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posted by martyb on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the blame-it-in-IT dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Revek on Sunday April 12 2020, @05:38PM (1 child)

    by Revek (5022) on Sunday April 12 2020, @05:38PM (#981601)

    Can't really blame Microsoft for this one. I built a EMR based on a framework using mssql in 1997. We were their first customer and they ripped off a sizable portion of what I built and sold it to other with their own additions. In less than five years they had over hundred clients. When customers started to migrate away from them ten or so years later for newer web based solutions they made it difficult to migrate. A few of the people who still had my contact info got in touch and asked how they could pull their data out. Turns out they had limited the account accessing the mssql server to the point they couldn't even see the main unique document ID. You couldn't edit most forms anymore so you couldn't pull the variable names from them. I showed them how to change the main database login to use the SA account and they were able to work out how to map the variable names by pulling the form blobs and importing them into a editor. It was a huge undertaking and should not have been necessary. The losing company made it near impossible to export their data with no repercussions at all. Its even worse today To many solution and not enough regulation to force interoperability between vendors. It will only get worse unless this country wakes up to the problem.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @05:55PM (#981612)

    Can't really blame Microsoft for this one

    Fuck the M$ Mafia and all those who worship ID2020's front man, Gates.

    I'll not take the mark, Gates, you can go fuck yourself. [reddit.com]