Within weeks of the first documented U.S. coronavirus cases, nursing homes had become hot spots, eventually linked to more than 40% of deaths from COVID-19. Infection control and hygiene in nursing homes came under fire and action needed to be taken, fast, to slow the spread.
In order to implement greater surveillance and enforcement of infection control protocols, CMS was collecting data from nearly 17,000 nursing homes across the U.S. — and then sending it to the CDC via email each day.
“CMS and the CDC had no clear mechanism to exchange data,” explains Sankar Subramanian, head of Ventera’s Federal Healthcare division. “When a crisis strikes, that’s when you see the gaps in IT infrastructure and need to scramble for a solution to meet urgent needs.”
Ventera’s data solutions and user-centered design teams partnered with CMS and CDC stakeholders to outline each agency’s immediate needs, what problems needed to be solved, how we could address IT gaps and where data needed to go.
Within 72 hours, Ventera implemented a managed file transfer solution to power reliable, secure and immediate data exchange between the agencies.