Objective: The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak progressed rapidly from a public health (PH) emergency of international concern (World Health Organization [WHO], 30 January 2020) to a pandemic (WHO, 11 March 2020). The declaration of a national emergency in the United States (13 March 2020) necessitated the addition and modification of terminology related to COVID-19 and development of the disease's case definition. During this period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and standard development organizations released guidance on data standards for reporting COVID-19 clinical encounters, laboratory results, cause-of-death certifications, and other surveillance processes for COVID-19 PH emergency operations. The CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository was created to address the need for PH and health-care stakeholders at local and national levels to easily obtain access to comprehensive and up-to-date information management resources.
Materials and methods: We introduce the clinical and health-care informatics community to the CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository: a new, national COVID-19 information management tool. We provide a description of COVID-19 informatics resources, including data requirements for COVID-19 data reporting.
Results: We demonstrate the CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository's categorization and management of critical COVID-19 informatics documentation and standards. We also describe COVID-19 data exchange standards, forms, and specifications.
Conclusions: This information will be valuable to clinical and PH informaticians, epidemiologists, data analysts, standards developers and implementers, and information technology managers involved in the development of COVID-19 situational awareness and response reporting and analytics.
Keywords: COVID-19; data standards; electronic data exchange; emergency preparedness and response; pandemic.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association 2020. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.