By:  Hadassa Kalatizadeh

An audit released last Tuesday revealed that the number of Covid-19 related nursing home deaths in New York State was understated by roughly 4,100.  The audit, performed by the office of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, also found that the Department of Health, under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, didn’t effectively use the data to remedy nursing-home outbreaks.

As reported by Crain’s NY, the audit has spurred stakeholders to advocate for improvements in the state Department of Health’s data practices.  DiNapoli said the Health Department should improve the quality of self-reported data from nursing homes by having them collaborating better with the industry.  “Too often regulatory entities are just seen as being hostile to the industry,” he said in an interview.  One suggestion would be to add training sessions to teach nursing home employees to properly use reporting tools including the Nosocomial Outbreak Reporting Application (NORA), added DiNapoli.  “I don’t subscribe to the idea of less regulation, just more collaboration,” he said. “The problem has not been an overregulation of nursing homes. It’s been an inadequate implementation of the regulations we already have.”

The audit revealed that the department of Health “routinely underreported death counts” in its oversight of NY nursing homes. It also found that the department does not analyze the data it gets from multiple nursing homes to identify problems or detect outbreaks of infectious diseases across facilities. The audit concluded that if the Health department had more accurate data and performed proactive analyses, it could have better helped nursing homes respond to the pandemic, potentially saving lives.

The audit added that the department “conformed its presentation to the executive’s narrative, often presenting data in a manner that misled the public,” it said referring to the former governor, his staff and members of a state interagency task force, including Dr. Howard Zucker, former state health commissioner.

Zucker, who resigned in September, responded to say:  “The Department of Health under my leadership worked tirelessly and with the highest level of integrity and provided the governor’s office regularly with data”.  He added in his statement to Crain’s, “However, the department did not have control over how the governor’s office represented that data to the public.”

In a written response to the audit, the Health Department said, “The department respectfully disagrees with the draft report’s conclusions in its entirety.”