Centura Health was able to report nearly 2,500 COVID-19 hospitalizations across the state, most of which occurred this fall when cases rose in Colorado, and hospital staff and state health officials refuse to elaborate on what happened.
And now local elected officials and public health officials are worried that the huge gap in data could wrongly affect key decision-making by government Jared Polis and the state, namely the recent easing of regulations last week.
“It is disturbing that the lack of reporting was during a critical period,” said Durango, Mayor of Durango. “I want to trust our healthcare providers, but this discovery is a little disturbing.”
The Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment issued a statement Tuesday stating that Centura Health could not report 2,450 COVID-19 hospitalizations.
State records show that the vast majority of missing hospitalization reports occurred in October, November and December, a time when the COVID-19 case in Colorado increased to a large extent.
Police said last week that the state’s declining hospitalization rate was partly one of the reasons why it had to move from Level Red to Level Orange. The governor’s office did not grant The Durango Herald an interview this week.
CDPHE explained the error and wrote that it was due to “a quality control system set up by local public health agencies and the state”.
“It has come to light that some of (Centura Health)’s hospitalizations have not penetrated the COPHS (COVID Patient Hospitalization Surveillance) because problems have been resolved with the coding of hospitals,” CDPHE wrote.
CDPHE did not want an interview with the Herald on the matter. In an email, the department said “the added hospitalizations … did not / would not affect any disc movement if it was reported correctly at the beginning.”
From October to December, Centura Health reported no more than 1,600 hospitalizations across the state.
Centura Health also did not interview the Herald this week. Centura owns 17 hospitals across Colorado and Western Kansas, including Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango.
In a brief statement, Centura Health spokeswoman Lindsay Radford said there was an ‘oversight’ of a coding issue that led to hospitalizations not being reported to the state.
“After we were aware of this difference, we quickly resolved it,” she said.
According to local elected officials and representatives of public health, the fact that nearly 2,500 hospitalizations were missed that fell back to April led to confusion and concerns about the accuracy of reporting.
With about 19,000 hospitalizations across the country, the missing reports are nearly 13% of the hospitalizations.
“Every decision we’re made since April is taken on erroneous data,” Chuck Stevens, manager of La Plata County, told a board meeting on Wednesday.
South Colorado officials have been demanding for months that Mercy Regional Medical Center be more transparent about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The situation reached a fever in December when elected officials roasted Centura and Mercy representatives during a public hearing and demanded that the hospital share data such as ICU bed capacity and hospitalizations.
“You tend to think you’re transparent,” said Barbara Noseworthy, Durango City Councilor at the time, “but it was not transparent, and perception is a reality.”
Mercy officials said they report hospitalization numbers to the state of Colorado twice a day, and that these numbers have been repeated 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 the data and who can share it.
Jollon said at a board meeting on Wednesday that she had instructed her staff last month to try again at CDPHE to gain better access to hospitalization figures.
The attempt, according to Jollon, was successful. But when her staff members reviewed the data set on December 22, they discovered that Centura Health had not entered a single hospitalization since May.
SJBPH staff members could not get clarity from Centura or the state on the apparent inconsistency. Jollon then brought it to the attention of the senior officials of the organizations, but no explanation was given for it.
Then on Tuesday, CDPHE released its statement.
What is worrying, local officials said, is that the hospitalization rate plays an important role in making decisions about what level of public health orders a community should have, which in turn has an impact on businesses and how they operate.
“We need the right information to take the right action,” Jollon said. “We need the confidence that these decisions will be made with accurate data sets.”
Rhonda Webb, CEO of Pagosa Springs Medical Center, said she checks Mercy’s hospitalization reports daily to determine if the Durango plant has the capacity to take patients in need of transfers.
“We rely on the data so we know where to place patients,” she said.
Webb addressed the situation, but given that hospitalizations are changing from minute to minute, staff at Pagosa Springs Medical Center will call Mercy regardless of whether the facility is capable of taking transfer patients.
“I would like to know if I need to worry about relocating patients,” she said.
Jon Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, is one of the clues for modeling the pandemic in the state. He said hospitalizations were one of the “key data” sets for modeling the COVID-19 trends.
“We use hospitalizations as a yardstick for what happens to the pandemic,” Samet said. “We feel it gives us the best picture of the Colorado epidemic.”
However, Samet said he uses a separate dataset for modeling provided by CDPHE that has not been affected by Centura Health’s incorrect reporting. Samet also said Polis uses the same untouched dataset for making public health decisions.
Samet said the unaffected dataset is EMResource. The one affected is called COVID patient hospitalization.
It is then unclear how CDPHE was able to recognize a discrepancy of nearly 2,500 hospitalizations between the two data sets. Samet directed further inquiries to CDPHE, which again granted no maintenance.
CDPHE’s news release on Tuesday did not help clarify the situation, and Jollon said SJBPH staff members were meeting with the agency on Monday. And it can not come sooner, as Colorado may enter an increase in cases after the holidays.
“There’s still a huge concern that Colorado, like every other state, could experience a winter push,” Jollon said. “If so, we need to pay close attention to our medical ability.”