CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network and Yale New Haven Health/Yale Center for Medical Informatics to Collaborate on Automated Hospital Reporting

New Haven, CT (April 29, 2021) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network[¹] (NHSN) surveillance system and Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS)/Yale Center for Medical Informatics[²] today announced that they are collaborating on a project to demonstrate implementation readiness for end-to-end automation of hospital pandemic reporting from the Yale New Haven Health to NHSN.

The NHSN-YNHHS/Yale project will evaluate a standards-based approach for automating demographic and clinical data collection and reporting. These data are needed for analysis and action during the pandemic, and the analytic needs include measuring healthcare outcomes for patient groups defined by demographic or clinical characteristics.

The project will launch with a proof of concept in April and move to a full production-level pilot relying on open, national data standards, specifically, HL7’s FHIR® API[³] and the ONC’s US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)[⁴].

The Yale Center for Medical Informatics focuses on the creative use of computers in clinical medicine, molecular biology, neuroscience, and other areas of biomedical research in partnership with Yale New Haven Hospital, Yale School of Medicine and the Department of Computer Science.

NHSN was established in 2005 and today over 37,000 U.S. healthcare facilities send data to NHSN to support their efforts to track and reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). It is the nation’s most comprehensive and established system to capture, analyze, and report back the intelligence facilities rely on to drive improvement and contain costs. NHSN data supports over $350 million in saving by CMS each year.

This project signal’s NHSN’s commitment to minimizing the burden on submitting facilities without compromise to data quality. “The goal is to provide a generalizable solution to data automation that reduces data collection and reporting burden on hospitals while providing timely and accurate data for analysis and response,” said Daniel A. Pollock, M.D., surveillance branch chief, CDC Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

The project will support the beta testing and production readiness of NHSNLink[⁵], an Open-Source Reference Implementation for NHSN Reporting. The app, which can be cloud-based or deployed on-premises, uses the FHIR standard to aggregate data from clinical systems, evaluate a clinical quality measure, and share the supporting line-level clinical data for the population matching NHSN surveillance requirements.

According to Dr. Yauheni Solad, medical director of Digital Health at Yale New Haven Health and associate research scientist, Yale Center of Medical Informatics, Yale School of Medicine, “NHSN real time data reporting can become a driving force of smarter decisions that will institutions to better allocate resources and be prepared for public health challenges.”

The proof of concept is anticipated to last approximately two months, and with appropriate IRB and security review, will move to a production-level pilot by the summer.

For more information on the project, contact the NHSN Help Desk at [email protected].

Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS), the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in Connecticut, is recognized for advanced clinical care, quality, service, cost effectiveness and commitment to improving the health status of the communities it serves. YNHHS includes five hospitals – Bridgeport, Greenwich, Lawrence + Memorial, Westerly and Yale New Haven hospitals, several specialty networks and Northeast Medical Group, a non-profit medical foundation with several hundred community-based and hospital-employed physicians. YNHHS is affiliated with Yale University and Yale Medicine, the clinical practice of the Yale School of Medicine and the largest academic multi-specialty practice in New England. Yale New Haven Hospital is the primary teaching hospital of Yale School of Medicine. www.ynhhs.org