A lack of integration limits the usefulness of multiple government databases that track health-care-acquired infections.
That’s one observation in an April 16 Government Accountability Office report that calls for improved data on infections that patients acquire in health care settings.
Cynthia Bascetta, GAO’s director of health care, summarized the report in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Health-care-acquired infections, or HAIs, rank among the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC pegs the number of deaths attributable to HAIs at 99,000 annually. The Health and Human Services Department operates several databases to keep tabs on HAIs, but the GAO report found them wanting.
“We concluded that HHS has not effectively used the HAI-related data it has collected through multiple databases across the department to provide a complete picture about the extent of the problem,” Bascetta said.
HHS’ HAI data holdings include CDC’s National Health Care Safety Network program, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System, CMS’ Annual Payment Update program, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.
Bascetta said each database provides only a partial view of the HAI problem, noting that individual databases concentrate data collection on certain types of HAIs and certain subsets of hospital patients.
“Although officials from the various HHS agencies discuss HAI data collection with each other, we did not find that the agencies were taking steps to integrate any of the existing data by creating linkages across the databases, such as creating common patient identifiers,” Bascetta said.
She noted that such linkages “could enhance the availability of information to better understand where and how HAIs occur.”
The GAO report recommends HHS improve the consistency and compatibility of data to increase the information available about HAIs.
GAO’s findings come at a time when more than a dozen states require hospitals to report HAI rates. Massachusetts recently became the 14th state to mandate such disclosures, calling for hospitals to begin reporting HAI data to CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network July 1.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
