COVID-19 changed the American public in several ways over the last three years. Importantly, it showed persistent gaps in U.S. public health infrastructure, and the importance of improving emergency responses for future global health events.
Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente worked with the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Alliance of Community Health Plans and America's Health Insurance Plans to recommend four key ways to prepare for another health emergency, according to a May 9 article on the AMA website.
1. Build connectivity. It is important to build a relationship between public health and healthcare with formalized mutual agreements and responsibilities, one expert said. Connectivity between public and private sectors will be crucial.
2. Ensure preparedness is always on. Make sure emergency preparedness is always on in health institutions. Build in infrastructure that is always ready and can be upscaled in the event of an emergency, one expert said in the article.
3. Develop interoperable data standards. There need to be higher standards for data collection, especially around equitable data collection, one expert said.
4. Modernize public health data systems. One expert said in the article he hopes to see a national infectious disease surveillance program in the future that allows public health to see into emergency rooms and hospitals in real time. Health systems are disjointed in how they collect data, so developing a way to transfer large-scale data to the same place in the event of a pandemic would be helpful, another expert said.