Hospitals are off the hook for data reporting requirements that have been in place since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Per guidance documents from the Department for Health and Human Services released in November, April 30 is the last day hospitals must report their COVID-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC's) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).
The required data included how many adult and pediatric patients were admitted to a reporting hospital for COVID-19, whether those patients’ conditions were laboratory-confirmed or suspected and whether they were being cared for in an ICU.
Requirements to report these and other related measures each day have been listed among the Conditions of Participation for Medicare since the fall of 2020. The CDC used these data to update public online tools for monitoring COVID-19 activity and other agency forecasting.
Though the COVID-19 public health emergency officially expired May 11, 2023, the reporting was extended on a non-daily basis with several fields removed or made optional “in an effort to reduce burden.” The CDC also ended its requirement for daily reporting on COVID-19 cases in favor of weekly reports.
Since then, the government expanded the NHSN in November to include optional fields for hospitals to report cases of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, which it noted at the time can also “result in substantial burden on hospitals” and potentially strain personal protective equipment inventories.
The CDC said it is encouraging “ongoing, voluntary reporting of hospitalization data.” It will begin making those voluntary data available for online viewing beginning May 10, per its COVID Data Tracker webpage.
The expiring reporting requirement lands as COVID-19 numbers continue to trend downward. Hospitalizations, the portion of positive COVID-19 tests and other metrics of case severity have generally dipped on a week-by-week basis since reaching a low peak at the top of the year, according to the CDC’s online numbers.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. has recorded more than 6.9 million hospitalizations and nearly 1.2 million deaths attributed to COVID-19.
Because of the ending NHSN requirements, lab-confirmed influenza hospitalizations and related information will also no longer be making it to the CDC. The agency said it will no longer include the data in its online FluView tracker “for the remainder of the 2023-2024 season” after May 3.