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.
Footnotes
- H+H’s transition to the EPIC system began in 2018 and was apparently controversial. On March 26, 2020 – the day after the CARES Act was passed – H+H announced the transition was complete. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
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