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Hospital and Physician Update |
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May – June 2020 Blue Cross teams up with Michigan hospitals for COVID‑19 data collection effortsBlue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is working with 35 Michigan hospitals to coordinate clinical data on COVID‑19 patients into a comprehensive registry. The registry, called MI-COVID19, will provide new insights into best practices in treating patients with the virus, and will likely be one of the largest collections of COVID‑19 patient data to date. The registry and subsequent data coordination efforts are being led by the Michigan Hospital Medical Safety Consortium, one of Blue Cross’ Collaborative Quality Initiatives, in collaboration with the following CQIs:
Because the registry will include anonymous patient data from multiple hospitals throughout the state, it will offer a line of sight across geographic, economic and demographic boundaries. “We’re fortunate in Michigan to have a mechanism in place that enables fast collaboration among providers to address critical health challenges such as the COVID‑19 crisis,” said Blue Cross President and CEO Daniel J. Loepp. “I’m incredibly proud that Blue Cross is one of the partners driving this initiative forward.” Thomas Simmer, M.D., chief medical officer of Blue Cross, added that the registry will provide a comprehensive clinical picture that’s not typically available from smaller registries that contain data from just one hospital or health system. “Given the rapid onslaught of the COVID‑19 pandemic, understanding of patient care has been largely anecdotal,” he said, “with limited data for providers to understand how to identify and treat patients. So, using the existing platform we use in the statewide Collaborative Quality Initiatives, we were able to rapidly gain statewide provider interest to convene the staff and hospitals necessary to launch this new effort.” By analyzing the registry data, participants of the MI-COVID19 initiative aim to identify factors associated with higher levels of critical COVID‑19 illness and worse outcomes, identify patient characteristics and treatment regimens associated with improved outcomes and understand longterm complications for hospitalized patients. “What we learn from this work will not only help now with currently hospitalized patients, but, in the future, should we experience another wave of COVID‑19 patients,” said Scott Flanders, M.D., program director of the Hospital Medical Safety consortium, chief clinical strategy officer at Michigan Medicine and professor of Internal Medicine – Hospital Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “Additionally, by studying long-term effects, we can better understand why some people need readmission to the hospital or how long it takes to return to normal health.” The type of information being collected for the MI-COVID19 clinical registry includes:
The list of hospitals participating in this registry continues to grow. Currently, the participating hospitals include:
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