After months of keeping facility-level long term care data from the public, Indiana will begin to release it later this month.
All of Indiana’s neighboring states and a growing number of states across the country have made similar data public.
The Indiana State Department of Health provided talking points to local health departments during a webinar last month about what to say if a person or agency requested any data.
Officials say now is the time to release more information because the state has resources to better analyze it. Dr. Dan Rusyniak, the chief medical officer for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration says mitigation and prevention remain the top priorities.
"As we have all learned, responding to this pandemic requires us to continually evaluate our approaches and when appropriate change them," Rusyniak says. "This is one of those times."
AARP Indiana was one of the groups calling on the state to release the data. Wednesday, the organization aploauded the decision writing, "this annoucement is a strong step toward clearing up the confusion stemming from data provided by different agencies."
The agency conitnued, "it is our hope that this new dashboard will bring more transparency to the difficulties we have seen at our long-term care facilities during this health crisis."
The state says it will take about a month to compile and build a database. Numbers the ISDH released Monday show more than 5,300 Hoosiers residing in long-term care facilities have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 1,100 have died.
