By Sandra R. Hernández, Photo: Jeff Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images, California Health Care Foundation, June 7, 2022
Early in the epidemic, I knew we had a problem. As the public health officer for San Francisco, I saw desperately sick people flooding health clinics daily. Doctors treated patients with the information they had but were flying blind: Paper files on existing health conditions were scattered across the state. It led to thousands of unnecessary tests, harmful delays in care, and avoidable suffering.
That was in the 1980s, amid San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic. Today, I see many of the same obstacles. Critical gaps in data are hampering everything from our response to the COVID-19 pandemic to our ability to rapidly support Californians in the path of wildfires and other natural disasters. It is slowing progress on addressing mental illness,substance use, and homelessness, and it’s making it harder to achieve health equity across the state.
California has long been a leader in transforming health care, expanding coverage, and improving access to care and social services for its residents. But to be successful, all of these initiatives require a reliable, secure, trusted system of data exchange so patients and providers can access the health information they need, wherever they are and whenever they need it.
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