Empowered Patient Podcast

Brett Furst, President of HHS Technology Group, is carrying on the mission of efforts started at the beginning of the COVID outbreak to collaboratively share data to provide insights to those doing research, drug development, and addressing the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable populations. Maintaining this world's largest COVID database, HTG allows research on complex social determinants of health and how to address health equity.  Brett explains, "So we were proud to take it on and be chosen by the consortium. Today we have the largest COVID research database in the world, with over 65 billion records. It touches almost 100% of our population in the United States. We're looking at all encounters from claims and clinical data, but also other more important for predictive modeling like social determinant data. We're trying to be more thoughtful about what's the next thing that's going to hit us out of the blue. We cannot be caught so flat-footed as we were in 2020." "There are concerns about long-term eff