Executive with Charlotte's Premier Inc. on Using Data Technology to Fight Covid-19

Michael Alkire is on a mission. He wants to see public officials use available data to craft better Covid-19 responses and plans to reopen the economy.

Alkire is president of Premier Inc., a Charlotte-based health-care improvement company. Premier works with more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems and about 175,000 other providers and organizations. The company is playing an active role in dispersing area-specific data nationwide.

The data is part of a "Covid-19 control tower." Premier’s system compiles and analyzes information from electronic medical records, or EMR, to flag Covid-19 symptoms and alert providers to potential surges. The technology can track this data down to the ZIP code, Alkire said. There are also tools to assess the significance or severity of the virus.

The next step is sharing the trends with public health officials and government leaders.

"As opposed to people making decisions based upon anecdote or based upon delayed data or other perspectives, provide the data to the health-care officials that are responsible for making these decisions, but provide them with real-time data, so they can truly manage the disease in their state or among their population," Alkire said.

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