HHS announced significant changes to the process for hospitals to fulfill the agency’s request for daily data reporting on bed capacity, utilization, personal protective equipment, and in-house laboratory testing data.
The CDC National Healthcare Safety Network COVID-19 module is no longer being used. Hospitals now have to either:
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report data to their state health departments (if their state promises to then report the data to HHS; or
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report directly to the HHS TeleTracking portal.
HHS has made significant updates to the data fields it is asking for in daily reporting. For example, HHS is asking for information on both pediatric and adult patients and is asking hospitals for information about their inventory of remdesivir.
Editorial Note: This is a controversial decision in the public health and academic world. The CDC has built a trusted brand for decades and public health and academics alike trust that the CDC behaves on the up and up, makes data available and is committed to data integrity. There’s less confidence in HHS because there are far more political appointees there- whereas CDC is dominated by career folks. There is concern that the data will become less transparent and questions about whether HHS will edit the data.
