Kushner’s team seeks national coronavirus surveillance system

Already, the Trump administration has sought to ease data-sharing rules and assure health data companies they won’t be penalized for sharing information with state and federal officials — a move driven in part by Kushner’s push to assemble the national network, according to an individual with knowledge of the decision.

“This is a genuine crisis — we have to work through it and do our best to protect people’s health,” said Jessica Rich, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau. “But doing that doesn’t mean we have to destroy privacy.”

Currently, the federal government plays only a limited role in handling health information, with its access restricted by various privacy laws and in many cases reliant on voluntary data-sharing agreements with individual states.

The project — based on interviews with seven tech executives, government officials and other people familiar with its contours — would draw on detailed information collected from multiple private-sector databases. It would allow federal officials to continuously track elements like hospitals’ bed availability and the flow of patients into specific emergency rooms across the country — thereby enabling the government to rush resources to parts of the country before they’re hit by a surge of coronavirus cases.

“It allows you to be much more targeted and precise in how you engage,” said one person involved in the discussions. “They need data to make the policy decisions, and so that’s what we and others now have been asked to do.”

The White House declined to comment in response to detailed inquiries on Tuesday, but spokesman Avi Berkowitz said in a late Tuesday night statement after this article was published: "This story makes no sense and is completely false. The White House gets many unsolicited random proposals on a variety of topics, but Jared has no knowledge of this proposal or the people mentioned in this article who may have submitted it."

The creation of a national coronavirus database could help the nation get out in front of the fast-spreading virus, which officials anticipate will strain the health care systems of nearly every major city over the next few months and threaten to recur in pockets of the nation for some time after that.

Yet concerns about data sharing and patient privacy aren’t the only obstacles to the plan — which was described by people familiar with it as one of a series of out-of-the-box initiatives sought by Kushner’s team. That team is composed of a range of federal officials, friends and leaders from the private sector seeking to promote innovative responses to the coronavirus crisis.

The notion of a national surveillance network has also faced resistance internally from some health officials, who argue that the federal government should only go as far as setting broad standards for disease and resource tracking and leave it to individual states to stand up their own surveillance networks, according to two individuals with knowledge of the discussions.

Other officials contend that the administration should build any new monitoring system on its own, without the private sector’s involvement – a position that’s gained steam following a series of articles about Kushner’s team and its involvement of private companies and executives in efforts to fix problems dogging the nationwide response, according two people briefed on the matter.

Some public health experts, meanwhile, suggested that the administration might instead built out and reorient an existing surveillance system housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that aided the response to prior epidemics. The system, called the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, is a voluntary collaboration between the CDC and various state and local health departments that draws data from more than 4,000 health care facilities.