Publications

New CDC Guidance for Reporting Health Care Infections

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued recommendations in February to help states track and publicly report health care-associated infections (HAIs) in hospitals and clinics. In hospitals alone, HAIs account for 2 million infections, 90,000 deaths, and 4.5 billion dollars in excess health care costs annually, according to the CDC. 

While CDC has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to determine whether mandatory reporting will reduce infection rates, it has recommended that states implementing public reporting should "strive to gather meaningful infection control data and use nationally recommended infection control measures." The recommendations are based on established principles for public health and HAI reporting systems.

Advocates of mandatory public reporting of HAIs, including the watchdog group Consumers Union and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, believe that making such information publicly available will enable consumers to make more informed choices about their health care and improve overall health care quality by reducing HAIs. 

The most common HAIs involve the bloodstream, urinary tract, pneumonia and surgical sites. The CDC believes that by following recommended infection-control strategies, health care facilities can significantly reduce these infections. The CDC recommends that persons who design and implement reporting systems adopt these practices:

  • Use established public health surveillance methods when designing and implementing mandatory HAI reporting systems;
  • Create multidisciplinary advisory panels that include persons with expertise in the prevention and control of HAIs, in order to monitor the planning and oversight of HAI public reporting systems;
  • Choose appropriate process and outcome measures based on facility type, and phase in measures to allow time for facilities to adapt and to permit ongoing evaluation of data validity; and
  • Provide regular and confidential feedback of performance data to health care workers.

The CDC recommends "that states establishing public reporting systems for HAIs select one or more of the following process or outcome measures as appropriate for hospitals or long-term care facilities in their jurisdictions: 1) central-line insertion practices; 2) surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis; 3) influenza vaccination coverage among patients and health care personnel; 4) central line-associated bloodstream infections; and 5) surgical site infections following selected operations." 

Four states (Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Florida) have passed laws requiring hospitals to publicly disclose health care-associated infections, and as many as 30 other states are considering similar action. Since 1970, a group of U.S. hospitals — now totaling nearly 300 — has voluntarily reported to the CDC, on a confidential basis, data on selected HAIs that occur in their hospitals. 

The document Guidance on Public Reporting of Health Care-Associated Infections is available online.

Print Version