Highlights
- CDC is helping health departments and healthcare systems nationwide to expand existing emergency department (ED) visit data feeds to also include hospital inpatient visit data.
- This can help improve our ability to inform actions by understanding how bad outbreaks are getting and how serious illnesses are.
Full Story
Syndromic surveillance-which provides near real-time data on patient visits in EDs and other healthcare settings-gives public health officials timely data for detecting, understanding, and responding to health threats. By tracking symptoms of people seeking medical care, public health professionals can detect unusual levels of illness to determine, monitor, and respond to disease trends.
Traditionally, syndromic surveillance efforts at CDC have focused on ED visit data. CDC and public health partners are expanding their approach beyond ED visits by collecting detailed information from when patients are seen as inpatients. CDC's National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) is supporting the expansion of existing state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) agency ED visit data feeds, in collaboration with healthcare systems, to include inpatient visit data as well. These inpatient visit data are for all hospital admissions, not just those ED visits that resulted in hospital admissions.
For this initiative, CDC is providing technical assistance to jurisdictions to help evaluate existing dataflows and determine if any changes may be needed. Additionally, CDC is assisting with onboarding plan development, pre-production validation of newly provisioned inpatient visit data, and more. This collaborative work improves responsiveness to our nation's needs by strengthening how public health gathers and understands data on individuals visiting ED or that are hospitalized as an inpatient.
The inpatient visit data use the same technical specifications as the ED visit data do, making this expansion a natural progression that builds on existing infrastructure at healthcare facilities and health departments. Incorporating inpatient visit data to syndromic surveillance improves the ability to determine how bad an outbreak of a disease has gotten, showing how full hospitals are and how long patients are staying, and highlighting how diseases appear in our communities.
Integrating Hospital Inpatient Visit Data Can Improve Public Health Efficiency
· Expand understanding of hospital utilization
· Recognize trends regarding patients' length of hospital stays
· Observe changing patterns of patients with more than one health condition
ED visit data feeds from healthcare facilities offer near real-time insights, sometimes even before a person has been formally diagnosed. Inpatient visit data feeds provide additional information about those patients requiring more extensive care and oversight. Combining inpatient visit data with ED visit data helps public health agencies get a faster, more complete picture to inform further investigation and help patients get the best possible care.
As part of this inpatient data initiative, NSSP has established onboarding assistance teams that are resourced to help support jurisdictional inpatient data activities, including evaluating existing data feeds and validating data.
This work has also helped CDC move closer to reaching a Public Health Data Strategy (PHDS) milestone to expand real-time access to inpatient hospitalization data. Inpatient hospitalization data is a critical source of information in variety of health emergencies, from disease outbreaks to natural disasters. PHDS is helping accelerate access to these important data to protect American lives.