Thread by @1foreverseeking

US Military takeover of COVID-19 response.

Please read this thread.

They are tracking Medicare!

Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at US Department of Defense (DoD) assembled leading tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, & Esri, under Project Salus. (Salus is the Roman goddess of health & well-being.)

esri.com/about/newsroom…

Digital health innovation company Humetrix was brought in to analyze data about older individuals & others who are most at risk for severe COVID-19 & to build a dashboard to present results in an easy-to-interpret visual format. But getting that data was going to be a challenge.

Health mission chief for JAIC, US Navy captain Dr Hassan Tetteh, a thoracic surgeon & informatics specialist caring for COVID-19 patients realized diagnosis & other medical codes included on Medicare claims could help track where people were contracting the disease.

By early April 2020, Project Salus received 10s of millions of deidentified Medicare claim records from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in a secure government enclave.

(They claim all personal ID info has been removed.)

This database of Medicare claims, was designed to capture COVID-19 diagnoses in a large, Medicare-covered population that was geographically distributed across the United States.

Humetrix team processed & analyzed data using its analytics platform, which employs various algorithms & relies on a classic statistical analysis method called logistic regression to identify risk factors for different disease outcomes, including COVID-19.

With help from Esri, Humetrix used the DoD’s ArcGIS Enterprise system to map the results of its analyses and display them on a dashboard created with ArcGIS Dashboards.

Medicare claims tracked!
👉April 2020 to July 2021, # of Medicare beneficiaries in Project Salus database grew 5 to 20 million. By August, Medicare patients Humetrix observing included more than 2.7 mil COVID cases & accounted for about 50% of all COVID hospitalizations & deaths

Once COVID vaccines became available, Medicare claims began including codes that showed when patients received their shots. Humetrix was able to overlay this vaccination data on the COVID-19 risk map it had already built to see where vaccination campaigns needed to be ramped up.

👉According to Humetrix, the deidentified Medicare claims are showing...Of those breakthrough cases, 20% were hospitalized compared to 32% of the COVID-19 cases in the cohort before vaccinations began.

Tracking medical histories!

Because Humetrix has access to Medicare beneficiaries’ deidentified prior medical histories, analytics can pinpoint when individuals experience adverse events after vaccination & use diagnosis codes to see if ailments are new or were present before.

The company is providing its data to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) & the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for further study.

From January to June 2021, Humetrix recorded a 90 percent reduction in daily COVID-19 cases in its Medicare cohort, thanks to the massive vaccination campaign that got under way and that the military helped execute.