Building capacity of community health centers to overcome data challenges with the development of an agile COVID-19 public health registry: a multistate quality improvement effort

This article shows efforts of six grant-funded regional partners to create a usable public health analytic system to address health inequities among COVID-19 positive cases on an individual patient level. The article highlights the many challenges of this Multistate Data Strategy, including lack of standardization across data sources, missing data fields, and different state-level reporting requirements. However, the ability to produce this analytic system in real time, including a standardized COVID-19 data dictionary, demonstrates the necessity for healthcare administrators to utilize deidentified patient-level data in order to provide better care for state residents, particularly in disadvantaged communities.