Additional Modifications Announcement Email - 14MAY2020

Samuel, Lee (CDC/DDPHSIS/CGH/DPDM)
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NHSN (CDC)
Tuesday, May 12, 2020 8:31 PM
Wattenmaker, Lauren (CDC/DDID/NCEZID/DHQP)
Upcoming Additional and Modified Fields for Acute Care COVID-19 Module
HHS Ltr to Hospital Admins FAQs.pdf

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.
The following changes are anticipated to be made to the Patient Impact and Hospital Capacity Pathway on
the evening of Thursday, May 14, 2020. The morning after the application update, a follow-up communication
will be sent to users to confirm the changes.
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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 will also update the Table of Instructions (TOI), the data
collection form and the CSV (comma separated values) template used by facilities to upload COVID-19 data.
All documents will be available on NHSN’s COVID-19 webpage soon after the changes have been made to the
system. Links will be provided in the post-release communication. Data submission for the new and updated
fields are anticipated to begin on Friday, May 15, 2020, dependent on successful system update on Thursday
evening.
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

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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 will not change. Wording will be 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 will capture 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
TOL will also identify that this represents the prevalence of hospital onset cases.
PREVIOUS DAY’S DEATHS: In an effort to simplify data collection for facilities and to ensure, the
completeness of death data, this field title is changed from “DEATHS” to “PREVIOUS DAY’S DEATHS” and
will be 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 [email protected] with “hospital reporting COVID-19” in the subject line for questions regarding
the COVID-19 Module.

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