The CDC National Healthcare Safety Network: Planned Changes and Improvements and the Impact of State Mandates and CMS Rules

Brief Summary
The collaborations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Team has with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide important momentum for advances in healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance at the local, state, and federal levels.  The work that has been accomplished and new efforts underway are extending NHSN’s capacity to produce accurate and valid surveillance data for effective prevention of HAIs in a variety of healthcare settings.  As a result of state and CMS requirements, NHSN has emerged as the primary system used for HAI surveillance and reporting in the U.S.  This development, in turn, has led to important changes and improvements to NHSN.  These changes have been implemented for the purposes of reducing subjectivity, maximizing standardization, preventing data entry errors, improving simplicity and completeness of data entry, and more accurately defining the facility types and locations from which data are reported.  The major recent enhancements include revisions made to better standardize HAI criteria and definitions, new alerts and reporting simplifications for antimicrobial resistance data, additional output options for analysis and reports, more accurately defined locations for certain facility types, and new reporting options, including Mucosal Barrier Injury for CLABSIs and Ventilator-Associated Event reporting.  The NHSN system is also stabilized with additional servers and architecture upgrades as necessary.  Electronic reporting capability through Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) will be expanded to include antimicrobial resistance reporting through the Antimicrobial Use and Resistance Module and always includes enhancements for improved reporting.  New additions coming soon to the NHSN system include the Outpatient Procedure Component and a new Component specifically for Dialysis Event reporting.  Together these revisions serve to improve the user interaction and experience with NHSN and the quality of the data that are analyzed and reported out of the system.  During this session users will be asked to provide feedback and input on current and future enhancements to the NHSN system.  The impact of state mandates and CMS rules to users, stakeholders, and the system will be discussed as a group.   The intent is to make this an informative and interactive NHSN presentation and discussion.