There are numerous areas within clinical workflows for COVID-19 that might be open to improvement and ultimately help provide patient-safe care. There is a need to determine clear prioritization principles around areas of focus for data capture within COVID-19 workflows. We suggest that we focus on areas in the workflow with important data reporting needs and work together to improve the quality and utility of this data – perhaps iPad data entry, collection of signs and symptoms, emergency warning signs, patient-reported data etc. There needs to be a reliable and consistent way to create and implement business process automation artifacts into VA health IT systems.
Questions we hope to help answer:
How do we determine what data elements are valuable to monitor, track, and manage?
How do we discover the data elements that have predictive value?
What data analysis would most impact COVID-19 care and treatment outcomes?
How does the collection of these data elements in a consistent and high-quality manner and the subsequent data analysis fit into the overall goal of achieving coordinated, national, highly-reliable care?