NHSN Connectivity Initiative – Hospital Bed Capacity Project
The 2020 pandemic placed a significant strain on hospital and emergency management resources and unfortunately, the impact persists and healthcare compliance mandates remain.
Both federal and state governments continue to require daily and real-time reporting on current census, available beds, and the infection status of patients. The federal government has mandated that hospitals serving Medicare members must comply with these reporting requirements or they risk their Conditions of Participation (CoP) in the Medicare health system. This mandate affects the majority of hospitals across the United States.
We developed a tool designed to ease the reporting burden on staff, standardize data elements, enhance data quality and reliability, and ultimately allow healthcare workers to focus more on delivering patient care.
As we transition beyond the COVID pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has introduced new reporting requirements, highlighting that “the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the need for the federal government to collect information about healthcare-system stress to enhance patient safety during emergencies.” Under the CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI), a new program has been launched called the NHSN Connectivity Initiative: Hospital Bed Capacity Project. This program aims to “strengthen the core of public health data by improving the tracking of information on healthcare capacity.”
For this to be successful, hospitals must provide census-related information to the CDC through NHSN on a more real-time basis. However, manual reporting would impose an overwhelming burden on hospitals, making it difficult to manage with existing staff and resource limitations.
MORE TO COME SOON….