Case Study: National Healthcare Safety Network
The National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the nation’s most widely used healthcare-associated infection (HAI) tracking system.
Launched in 2005, NHSN supports more than 38,000 healthcare facilities and more than 145,000 end users in the United States. NHSN provides healthcare facilities, states, regions, and the nation with data needed to identify problem areas, measure progress of prevention efforts, and ultimately eliminate HAIs.
The system enables healthcare facilities to track blood safety errors and important healthcare process measures, such as healthcare personnel influenza vaccine status and infection-control adherence rates. NHSN also reports facility-specific, clinical quality measure data to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), where the data are used by CMS’ public reporting and payment programs.
Changes in Reporting
The NHSN program introduced the initial Hospital COVID Data (HCD) report in April 2020, within 2 weeks of the pandemic’s onset. The system’s reporting capability expanded aggressively. Hospital adoption grew rapidly, and the government decided to move the reporting responsibility from CDC’s NHSN to a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) TeleTracking contract in the summer of 2020.
Since 2020, Leidos has introduced the Long-Term Care Facility (LTCF) module via three surveillance pathways for reporting:
- Resident impact and facility capacity -- admissions, positive tests, vaccination status, deaths, etc.
- Staff and personnel impact – positive tests, deaths, staffing shortages
- Therapeutics – stock availability, stock ordered
In addition to these pathways, we also introduced point-of-care (POC) testing reporting. Since October 2020, NHSN has processed over 45 million tests and integrated these results with the Association of Public Health Laboratories Informatics Messaging Service AIMS platform, which routes the data to state, tribal, local, and territorial jurisdictions.
When the government decided to move reporting responsibility back to CDC, the Leidos team knew that failure was not an option. Staff members, in an all-out commitment to supporting NHSN, implemented a phasing strategy that enabled the transition to occur seamlessly and on time.
