COVID-19 vaccine and test data management – practice report from a university hospital

ISSUE: The COVID-19 pandemic generated the urgency for creating and implementing new tools, specifically for data collection, sharing. The data governance of healthcare workers (HCW) was layered on top of pre-existing digitalisation issues in health authorities as well as in health facilities. DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM: The vaccination act for the German healthcare sector adopted in December 2021, established the compulsory report of HCWs’ COVID-19 vaccination status. The LMU University Hospital management required an overview of the COVID-19 status (illness, isolation, vaccination, infection) of HCWs in order to ensure continuous clinical service. For the timely and accurate report, it was necessary to create a centralised real-time overview of data that were collected and managed by decentralised structures. RESULTS: We connected five in-hospital systems into one platform that was being synced three times a day. For each HCW, we created a dataset with three main categories: core personnel data, COVID-19 status and reason for absence. Two user groups were defined: strategic management (1) and operational management (2), where users of group 2 were only given access to their own unit and were required to update and verify data of their team. Overall, the platform contained data of 14,419 HCWs and had 656 users (Ngroup1 = 16, Ngroup2 = 640). LESSONS: The data merger revealed issues in interoperability and accuracy and thus expedited data standardisation. The decentralised approach facilitated the operational efficiency, digitalisation, service delivery and managerial empowerment at the hospital. The main challenges pertained to data accuracy and to the continuously changing regulatory requirements as well as privacy protection. As all data were previously hosted on different platforms, an exhaustive process of cleansing was needed prior to merging. Each HCW was assigned to an organisational unit with a respective responsible person in order to achieve data quality. KEY MESSAGES: • Dedicated digital human resources solutions in a university hospital pose a specific challenge for the balance between data privacy, availability and interoperability. • To enable a centralised information display, data must be collected where it originates and made available through short paths. Our solution united decentralised collection and centralised management.