Blast Email - NHSN 14MAY2020

Dear NHSN Users:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) continues to support the nation’s COVID-19 response by updating the acute care COVID-19 Module.

An update to the acute care COVID-19 Module has been released. The following changes have been made to the Patient Impact and Hospital Capacity Pathway:

• Addition of 3 new data entry fields

• Modification of the Hospital Onset field and the Death field for clarity

To accompany these application changes, NHSN has also updated the Table of Instructions (TOI), the data collection form and the template for CSV (comma separated values) which is used by facilities uploading the COVID-19 data. All three documents can be found on NHSN’s COVID-19 webpage available on the NHSN website. Data submission using the new and updated fields should begin today, Friday March 13, 2020.

NEW FIELDS:

PREVIOUS DAY’S ADMISSIONS WITH CONFIRMED COVID-19: New patients admitted to an inpatient bed who had confirmed COVID-19 at the time of admission

PREVIOUS DAY’S ADMISSIONS WITH SUSPECTED COVID-19: New patients admitted to an inpatient bed who had suspected COVID-19 at the time of admission

PREVIOUS DAY’S NEW HOSPITAL ONSET: Current inpatients hospitalized for a condition other than COVID-19 with onset of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 on the previous day and the previous day is fourteen or more days since admission

MODIFIED FIELDS:

HOSPITAL ONSET: Total current inpatients with onset of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 fourteen or more days after admission for a condition other than COVID-19

PREVIOUS DAY’S DEATHS: Patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 who died in the hospital, ED, or any overflow location on the previous calendar day

Modification summaries for the two fields:

HOSPITAL ONSET: The intent of this field has not changed. Wording has been modified for clarity purposes and additional guidance provided in the Table of Instructions to distinguish this field from the new field of PREVIOUS DAY’S NEW HOSPITAL ONSET. This field captures the total number of current inpatients at the time of data collection who had onset of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 fourteen or more days after admission (for a condition other than COVID-19) and are still inpatients at the time of data collection. The Table of Instruction also identifies that this represents the prevalence of hospital onset cases.

PREVIOUS DAY’S DEATHS: This field title is changed from “DEATHS” to “PREVIOUS DAY’S DEATHS” and re-designed to capture the number of COVID-19 associated deaths for the previous calendar day.

As a reminder, submitting data via the NHSN application’s COVID-19 Module continues to fulfill the reporting request for “Capacity and Utilization Data” detailed in Secretary Azar’s letter and FAQs dated April 10, 2020 (see attached).

Facility-level data collected through NHSN as part of the COVID-19 Module are being made available to a broader set of Federal, state, and local agency data users than data typically collected by NHSN. Specifically, COVID-19 data at the state, county, territory, and facility level submitted to NHSN will continue to be used for public health emergency response activities by CDC’s emergency COVID-19 response, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’) COVID-19 tracking system maintained in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response as part of the National Response Coordination Center at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and by the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Please contact NHSN@cdc.gov with “hospital reporting COVID-19” in the subject line for questions regarding the COVID-19 Module.