UPDATE: New York City Public Hospital Agency Refuses to Release 2017-2019 Death Data
If there's nothing to hide, then why is NYC Health + Hospitals hiding data from the public AND themselves?
The entity that manages New York City’s public hospitals refuses to release the 2017-2019 death data I requested via freedom of information request.
After a six-month delay, NYC Health + Hospital Corporation (H+H) finally responded to my May 9th, 2023 “ask” for the number of daily deaths occurring at each HHC hospital, from January 1, 2017 - December 31, 2020. I kept pushing for status updates and finally moved the needle by emailing a records officer directly at her staff agency address (versus the general FOIL email address).
The agency granted my request for daily deaths in 2020, but denied the request for earlier data, saying it was stored on a legacy software system. “In order to produce that data,” wrote records-access officer Vanita Yogeshwar on October 23, 2023, “it would require the coding of new programs, and would thus require creating a new record in contravention of the requirements of FOIL.”
I immediately appealed the denial, noting the agency had previously provided me with historical occupancy data [for Elmhurst Hospital]. I also said HHC has the records in its possession and the relative inconvenience of retrieval is irrelevant. “Creating new coding to access an existing record isn’t synonymous s creating a new record,” I wrote.
Andrea Cohen, H+H general counsel and records appeal officer, responded and said record isn’t easily accessible to the agency, because it is in an old Electronic Records Management system that is no longer supported.1 To retrieve it would require the creation of new records, i.e., creating new codes, etc. (I don’t buy that excuse; you can read Ms. Cohen’s letter at the end of this post and decide whether you do.)
My question is this: Why is H+H keeping the records from themselves?
We are talking about very straightforward and fairly recent data. Is the agency saying they have no way for data analysts within their own system to access those records easily? They have locked the number of deaths occurring each day from 2017-2019 in a virtual vault? Why?
This isn’t the first time H+H has failed to provide basic information. In August, I emailed the H+H “COVID-19 Research Committee” about a discrepancy between COVID deaths in H+H hospitals, as reported in a study versus COVID deaths in H+H hospitals as reported to the New York State Department of Health. No one ever responded to my inquiry.2 Maybe the $2 BILLION DOLLARS in federal COVID relief funds that H+H has received isn’t enough to pay someone to monitor the inbox. 🙄
As to the data H+H did send, I’ll unpack that in a future post.
UPDATE 5/13/24
Daily Deaths (All Causes) in New York City Public Hospitals, Jan 1 - Dec 31, 2020
Letter from Andrea Cohen, Senior VP General Counsel & Records Appeals Officer to Jessica Hockett, October 30, 2023
Similarly, the state ignored my questions about why occupancy data that H+H gave me for Elmhurst Hospital conflicts with the state’s occupancy data for Elmhurst.
Andrea (Andy) Cohen is Senior Vice President of Legal Affairs and General Counsel to the health system. Ms. Cohen had served as Acting General Counsel since March 1, 2018. Prior to joining NYC Health + Hospitals, she served as Senior Vice President for Program at the non-profit United Hospital Fund, Director of Health Services in the Office of the Mayor, Health and Oversight Counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, and Trial Attorney at the US Department of Justice, among other roles.
She also served for seven years as a Commissioner on the Medicaid and CHIP Payment Advisory Committee, Congressional advisory panel. She graduated from Harvard College and Columbia Law School. In addition to managing the duties of the Office of Legal Affairs, Ms. Cohen continues to lead our Labor Relations work.
https://theorg.com/org/nyc-health-plus-hospitals/org-chart/andrea-g-cohen
She is not your run of the mill bureaucrat.
And who is this guy?
Mitchell Katz
Dr. Katz is the President and Chief Executive Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal health care system in the United States, with 11 acute care hospitals, 5 skilled nursing facilities, dozens of community health centers, a home care agency and an insurance plan, MetroPlus Health.
Since his appointment in 2018, the health system has significantly expanded access to health care, including the creation of NYC Care, a universal health access program that provides care to more than 80,000 uninsured New Yorkers. He oversaw the creation of a modern electronic health record system, increased the number of nurses working in the system, developed a modern ambulance transport system, and launched new street outreach programs to improve the health of homeless New Yorkers. He also led the financial turn-around of NYC Health + Hospitals by eliminating the deficit through enrolling more New Yorkers into health insurance and appropriately billing insurance plans.
Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Katz provided strategic guidance to Mayor Bill de Blasio, while directing the public health system’s response to the surge of patients that peaked to a maximum of 3,700 patients, requiring the tripling of ICU capacity at its 11 hospitals to save New Yorkers. As the epicenter of the epicenter, NYC Health + Hospitals became the trusted care provider for thousands of New Yorkers, led the city’s Test and Trace operation, and administered more than 1.3 million COVID-19 vaccines.
Previously, Dr. Katz served as Director of the Los Angeles County Health Agency, which combines the Departments of Health Services, Public Health, and Mental Health into a single entity to provide integrated care and programming within Los Angeles. The Agency has a budget of $7 billion, 28,000 employees, and a large number of community partners. Dr. Katz served as the Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS), the second largest public safety net system in the United States. During this time, he created the ambulatory care network and empaneled more than 350,000 patients to a primary care home. He eliminated the deficit of DHS through increased revenues and decreased administrative expenses, and used ACA funding to pay for a new integrated electronic health system. He moved more than 4,000 medically complex patients from hospitals and emergency departments into independent housing, thereby eliminating unnecessary expensive hospital care and giving the patients the dignity of their own home.
Before he came to Los Angeles Dr. Katz served as Director and Health Officer of the San Francisco Department of Health for 13 years. He is well known for funding needle exchange, creating Healthy San Francisco, outlawing the sale of tobacco at pharmacies, and winning ballot measures for rebuilding Laguna Honda Hospital and San Francisco General Hospital.
He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Medical School. He completed an internal medicine residency at UCSF Medical School and was an RWJ Clinical Scholar. Dr. Katz continues to practice as a primary care physician and sees patients at NYC Health + Hospitals/Gouverneur on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He is the Deputy Editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (previously the Institute of Medicine) and the recipient of the Los Angeles County Medical Association 2015 Healthcare Champion of the year.
https://theorg.com/org/nyc-health-plus-hospitals/org-chart/mitchell-katz
2 long winded, specious pages were not quite enough for Andrea Cohen to successfully bullshit her way in defiance of FOIL law. Could She/They be hiding evidence that death records from the recent past 2017-2019 belie the claims of catastrophe throughout 2020? I think they're guilty of worse.