Pandemic Response Improves Healthcare for the Future
In addition to modifications to accommodate COVID-19 as a disease managed within the RPMS environment, IHS released patches to enable vaccine reporting through automated interfaces. It distributed 61 software releases between February 2020 and June 2021.
“This involved a lot of work in the field,” Thornbrugh says.
Because RPMS is installed at every facility, each had to adopt those changes and train users. In April 2020, IHS decided to replace its RPMS system rather than rewrite it. The pandemic, Thornbrugh says, “really emphasized our need to change and modernize as a whole.”
The new system, which will take several years to deploy, will improve record-keeping and disease tracing across the country for all types of patients and illnesses, even after the pandemic eases.
“Everybody did a great job ramping up to get the national dashboard in place, but that was a lot of local effort,” Thornbrugh says. “It was every hospital, every clinic having to verify numbers daily, having to reconcile changes if the data changed. We look forward to a time when data normalization — that kind of national reporting — will happen much more expediently.”
READ MORE: IHS CIO Mitchell Thornbrugh talks about the early days of RPMS modernization.