At the beginning of the pandemic, it became clear that HHS needed a central way to make data collected by various operating divisions, including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and others, visible to first responders at federal, state, and local levels and we needed to collect this data as fast as possible. To fulfill this need, HHS built HHS Protect, a secure data ecosystem powered by eight commercial technologies for sharing, parsing, housing, and accessing COVID-19 data and driven by four principles: transparency, sharing, privacy, and security.
