Hospitals will soon submit their pandemic statistics to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network system after two years of reporting to the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States, starting with the 2022 EHR reporting.
The Trump Administration gave hospitals instructions to swiftly adapt to new federal reporting requirements in July 2020. They were advised to send their COVID-19 patient, supply, and other data to HHS, rather than the CDC, as they had been trained to do.
Hospitals will submit their COVID-19 data to the NHSN after December 31 due to the expiration of the HHS agreement with Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies, the company in charge of overseeing the new reporting procedure.
As part of the Medicare interoperability objectives, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandated Syndromic Surveillance Reporting to the CDC’s NHSN in the 2022 EHR reporting period in a final regulation that was published in the Federal Register on August 13.
The COVID-19 Guidance for Hospital Reporting was also amended by HHS on August 10; it highlighted a number of requirements as dormant and included the remark to make sure comprehensive reporting to NHSN is as per CMS guidance. The two-day switch to the TeleTracking reporting system and, in some jurisdictions, the need for duplicate reporting presented significant difficulties for many hospitals at first. It has come to light that the transition to the new guidelines had prompted chaos.
Meanwhile, when the CDC was replaced by HHS, public health professionals and decision-makers were originally concerned that crucial data on public health might become politicised.
Some hospital associations submitted comments to CMS asking that the disruption brought on by changes to the reporting system be minimised. They were frustrated by the increased administrative and financial burdens related to the delivery of Remdesivir and other COVID-19 consumables in 2020 during the chaotic reporting transition.
According to CMS officials in the Federal Register, “CDC, CMS, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT should collaborate closely in order to align the prerequisites for public health data gathering and the required health information technology capabilities. The three agencies are also working together, and CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative is attempting to simplify requirements.