Technical glitch leads Miami’s public hospital network to overcount COVID inpatients
In March, when Miami-Dade County’s public hospital network designed a computer code to count all its patients who had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, it wasn’t built to function for the remainder of the year.
That became evident over recent weeks at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where officials noticed the daily reported count of patients with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, seemed slightly off from what they were seeing on the hospital floors.
An internal review found that the hospital system’s code was overcounting patients because it was including anyone who had ever had a positive test in the Jackson system, even if that diagnosis was months old. As of Tuesday morning, 30 of the roughly 170 patients who were in the hospital network and had been counted the night before were being removed from the tally because they no longer had an active case.
“It’s no longer enough to just say this patient had a positive COVID test,” said Matthew Pinzur, vice president and chief marketing officer at Jackson. “This pandemic has now been facing our community for long enough that we need to be looking at when they had a positive COVID test.”
The overcount of patients in the Jackson system would not have been enough to impact or distort overall trends in Miami-Dade County, which has had hundreds of patients hospitalized at all times since the pandemic began and has had a recent surge in admissions.
Pinzur said Jackson Health System has not retroactively corrected the historical data it has reported. He added that the hospital network’s technical staff have not yet decided on how it will define an active COVID-19 case going forward and will have to build a new way to query the system’s internal database.
“There is so much information in a patient’s medical record that there aren’t always simple ways to ask a question,” Pinzur said.
The data error at Jackson offers an alternative explanation for a period of time in November when the number of non-COVID patients who had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test outnumbered actual COVID patients at the public hospital network for a week or longer, according to internal data.
When the Herald reported on the pattern a month ago, public health experts viewed the anomaly as a potential indicator that the virus was being detected in more people with mild or asymptomatic cases as it spread more widely across the community, a conclusion now complicated by bad data.
Pinzur said the “relatively small variation in the numbers that we’re reporting does not change the fact that this is a very real, very serious and growing issue in our community and the most important thing that anyone can do is take responsibility for their own behavior.”
“Whether we have 170 patients or 140 patients you should still be wearing a mask whenever you’re indoors, avoiding crowds, practicing hand hygiene and social distancing,” he said.
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 4:58 PM.
