Three members of Congress are seeking a formal review by a nonpartisan congressional watchdog of a $10.2 million contract awarded to a Pittsburgh company to track hospital resources and cases of COVID-19.
In a letter Wednesday to the Government Accounting Office, U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr., Anna G. Eshoo, health committee chair, and Diana DeGette, oversight and investigations subcommittee chair — all Democrats — asked for a review of changes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services made to hospital COVID-19-related reporting requirements as the result of the contract awarded in April to Downtown-based TeleTracking Technologies Inc.
The request came weeks after the company declined to provide details of the contract in a letter to Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington.
TeleTracking replaced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July in collecting information about the number of available intensive care beds, ventilators, medical supplies and other COVID-19-related data from the nation’s 6,200 hospitals.
Questions about the contract and the tracking program have been raised over the past several weeks, as concerns over issues such as the burden of the new reporting requirements on hospitals and the transparency of the new data.
“Unfortunately, the Trump administration continues to undermine COVID-19 response efforts by sidelining scientific and public health experts and threatening the quality of COVID-19 related data,” the letter to the GAO said. “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ introduction of new and potentially duplicative hospital capacity reporting requirements is yet another example of this concerning trend.”
Democratic House members and others have raised questions about HHS decision to switch to a private vendor to gather COVID-19 data and set reporting requirements for hospitals. In an Aug. 3 letter to Schumer and Murray, first published by the New York Times, TeleTracking Technologies lawyer A. Scott Bolden said COVID information gathered by the company would be available to federal response teams and others.
More than 1,000 hospitals and other medical facilities use TeleTracking products to “aggregate and present data to efficiently manage bed capacity and track patient progression from admission through discharge, enabling the movement of millions of patients through large scale, complex health care systems,” Mr. Bolden wrote.
Mr. Bolden declined to comment Wednesday. But in the letter to the two senators, he said TeleTracking Technologies’ contract was “subject to a broad non-disclosure agreement,” prohibiting the disclosure of details.
The company operates the HHS Coronavirus Data Hub, which reported Wednesday that 88.6% of Pennsylvania’s 202 acute care hospitals were submitting information to TeleTracking Technologies for display on the federal health department’s website. Only 4.52% of hospital beds in Pennsylvania were filled with COVID-19 patients, a number the website said was updated daily.
Kris B. Mamula: kmamula@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699
First Published: August 20, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
