Some Georgia Hospitals Are Refusing To Release Pandemic Information To The Public

Hospitals across Georgia are praising their workers for their role in fighting the pandemic. But even as the coronavirus has put a premium on timely communication of accurate information, some hospitals have decided not to provide their communities with information about the numbers of COVID-19 patients they are treating or how many employees have tested positive or died.

Public health experts say that during tragic times like this one, some leaders’ instinct might be to tighten the control of information. Hospitals may be trying to protect their “brand” from being associated with the disease, or they may think they are trying to prevent panic.

But that information is important for the public to know so that the reality of the pandemic punches through skepticism, experts say.

Christopher Friese, a professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, said just looking at the number of infections overall in a government count “doesn’t hit home.” He added, “When you say, ‘the hospital in my community, members of my community are being afflicted by this,’ I think it adds a degree of connection to the problem, and hopefully increases awareness that this is still an issue—that we still need to do all the right things and we need to protect ourselves and our loved ones.”

Research also shows that tracking and sharing the numbers of infected health care workers leads to better safety.

Some Georgia hospitals have been meticulously transparent,  Emory University and Gainesville-based Northeast Georgia Health System post-infection numbers daily on a public website. University Hospital Augusta and Albany-based Phoebe Putney Health System send out regular spreadsheets. Grady Health system sends out occasional updates and has answered news media questions on the numbers.

However, some hospitals refuse to release such information like Piedmont, Northside Hospital, and Wellstar Health System, citing “privacy” or even incorrectly suggesting that doing so would violate the law.

Reports that the state compiled earlier this summer obtained by the AJC through the Open Records Act show those three health care systems have treated some of the heaviest loads of COVID-19 patients.

The AJC asked eight hospital systems in metro Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia for basic information on what they’ve seen in the pandemic. Even as trends improve and businesses bustle in Georgia, the hospital systems that responded each say they are still treating double-digit numbers of pandemic patients.  Altogether, their worker infections to date stretch into the thousands. Each Hospital that responded had workers who died from COVID-19; six died from Grady Health System alone.

The hospitals all emphasized that those workers may have caught the disease outside of work and that the infections represent a small portion of their overall workforce.

Piedmont and Northside would not answer and did not explain why; Piedmont directed a reporter to public health agencies, and to a tweet from Piedmont CEO Kevin Brown that showed a graph with detailed day-by-day numbers trending down, but that deleted the numbers from public view. Northside did not respond to emails and calls.

Wellstar said it would not provide the numbers “out of respect for our patients and to comply with federal and state privacy laws.”

But according to experts, the law does not prohibit releasing anonymized data. It prohibits health care providers from releasing information that makes a patient identifiable.

“There’s no violation of privacy” in releasing the numbers, said Erin McDonough, senior vice president of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts.

McDonough knows from experience; just two weeks after boasting of its low internal transmission rate, her hospital reported that it had a COVID-19 cluster.  The infection cluster now includes 30 employees and 12 patients. McDonough and her staff issued press releases with the numbers of infections, their locations, infection control, weak spots, and the measures being taken.

McDonough said she would never second-guess another hospital, but suppressing information can backfire, she said. “Put yourself in the shoes of being a patient or a loved one of a patient, and you come to a hospital, and you expect that you know exactly what’s happening within the walls of that hospital,” she said. “And then you learn later that there was a cluster of COVID patients and staff that had tested positive. And no one ever told you that. Would you trust that hospital?”

Scott Steiner, CEO of Phoebe Putney, said that transparency has been the key to surviving the state’s first major COVID-19 outbreak.

He knows that the initial public reaction to breaking bad news can be rough, but health, safety, and patients’ confidence win long term. “It’s easy to be transparent when things are working your way,” he said. “It’s tough to be transparent when you know you’re going to have critics. But that’s OK.”

Releasing information also gives people concrete evidence when preventive measures like wearing masks are working, he said.

This will be all the more important when flu season approaches, potentially doubling the coronavirus’s impact.

“We’re coming into a very uncertain time,” Friese said. “And the way to get through uncertainty is transparency and consistent communication. When we’re not transparent with our information, and we’re not consistently sharing that with our community, we put the community at risk for not paying attention to this issue, to not following all the recommendations because it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

“We’re still very much in the thick of this.”