Centura Health has not reported nearly 2,500 COVID-19 hospitalizations since April across the state, most of which happened this fall, with increasing cases in Colorado, and hospital officials and state health officials refuse to explain in detail what It happened.
And now, local elected officials and public health officials are concerned that the large data gap may have wrongly influenced Governor Jared Polis and the state’s key decisions, that is, the recent easing of regulations last week.
“The lack of reporting during a critical period of time is worrying,” said Durango Mayor Dean Brookie. “I want to trust our healthcare professionals, but this discovery is a little unsettling.”
On Tuesday, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment released a statement that said Centura Health did not report 2,450 COVID-19 hospitalizations, dated April.
State records show that the vast majority of hospitalization reports missed happened in October, November and December, a time when the COVID-19 case count in Colorado was increasing.
Polis said last week that the decline in the state’s hospitalization rate was, in part, one of the reasons that justified the move from the Red Level to the Orange Level. The Governor’s Office did not grant The Durango Herald an interview this week.
Explaining the error, CDPHE wrote in the statement that it was the result of “a quality control system established by local public health agencies and the state”.
“He revealed that some of the hospitalizations (from Centura Health) were not reaching COPHS (COVID Patient Hospitalization Surveillance) because of some hospital coding problems, which have been fixed,” wrote the CDPHE.
CDPHE refused to provide an interview with the Herald about the subject. In an e-mailed statement, the department said that “the additional hospitalizations … did not / would not have affected any movement of the dial if reported correctly at first.”
From October to December, Centura Health did not register more than 1,600 hospitalizations across the state.
Centura Health also did not give an interview with the Herald this week. Centura has 17 hospitals in Colorado and western Kansas, including the Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango.
In a brief statement, Centura Health spokeswoman Lindsay Radford said there was an “oversight” of a coding problem that resulted in hospitalizations that were not reported to the state.
“As soon as we heard about this discrepancy, we resolved it quickly,” she said.
The fact that nearly 2,500 hospitalizations have been missed since April has created confusion and concerns about the accuracy of the reports, according to elected local officials and public health officials.
With nearly 19,000 hospitalizations across the state, lost reports account for nearly 13% of hospitalizations.
“All the decisions we have made since April were made on the basis of incorrect data,” said La Plata County Manager, Chuck Stevens, at a council meeting on Wednesday.
For months, officials in southwest Colorado demanded that Mercy Regional Medical Center be more transparent about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The situation peaked in December, when elected officials questioned representatives of Centura and Mercy at a public hearing, demanding that the hospital share data such as ICU bed capacity and hospitalizations.
“You tend to think you’re being transparent,” said Durango city councilwoman Barbara Noseworthy, “but it’s not been transparent and perception is the reality.”
Mercy officials said they report numbers of hospitalizations to the state of Colorado twice a day and repeat that those numbers are available on a network called EMResource.
But EMResource is not available to the public. San Juan Basin Executive Director of Public Health, Liane Jollon, said the local health department also has limited access to data and what it can share.
At a county council meeting on Wednesday, Jollon said he instructed his team last month to try again to contact CDPHE to gain better access to hospitalization fees.
This effort, said Jollon, was successful. But when their team members went to review the data set on December 22, they found that Centura Health had not gone into a single hospitalization since May.
SJBPH team members were unable to obtain clarification from Centura or the state for the apparent discrepancy. Jollon then drew the attention of high-ranking officials from these organizations, but has yet to receive an explanation.
Then, on Tuesday, CDPHE released its statement.
What is alarming, local officials said, is that hospitalization rates play a significant role in making decisions about what level of public health orders a community should be in, which in turn has an impact on businesses. and how they operate.
“We need the right information to do the right thing,” said Jollon. “We need the confidence that these decisions are made with accurate data sets.”
Rhonda Webb, CEO of Pagosa Springs Medical Center, said she checks Mercy’s hospitalization reports daily to determine whether the facility in Durango is capable of receiving patients who need transfer.
“We rely on this data to know where to place patients,” she said.
Webb called the situation worrying, but given the fact that hospitalizations change minute by minute, members of the Pagosa Springs Medical Center team would call Mercy independently to see if the facility was capable of receiving transferred patients.
“I like to know if I need to worry about transferring patients,” she said.
Jon Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, is one of the leaders in pandemic modeling in the state. He said that hospitalizations are one of the sets of “key data” to model trends in COVID-19.
“We use hospitalizations as a measure of what is happening with the pandemic,” said Samet. “We feel it gives us the best picture of where the Colorado epidemic is.”
Samet said, however, that he uses a separate data set for modeling provided by CDPHE that was not affected by the incorrect report by Centura Health. Samet also said that Polis uses the same set of unaffected data to make public health decisions.
Samet said that the unaffected dataset is EMResource. The impacted is called COVID Patient Hospitalization Surveillance.
It is not clear then how the CDPHE did not recognize a discrepancy of almost 2,500 hospitalizations between the two sets of data. Samet referred new questions to the CDPHE, which, again, did not grant an interview.
The CDPHE press release on Tuesday did not help to clarify the situation, and Jollon said members of the SJBPH team met with the agency on Monday. And that couldn’t happen before, because Colorado may be getting into a wave of cases after the holidays.
“There is still great concern that Colorado, like any other state, may experience a winter wave,” said Jollon. “If that’s the case, we need to pay close attention to our medical capabilities.”