The Trump administration has sent a letter to America’s hospitals, requesting that patient care organization leaders share capacity, supply and testing data with federal health officials so that the industry can more collaboratively fight COVID-19.
In a letter to all the nation’s hospital administrators, Vice President Mike Pence stressed that hospitals need to report COVID-19 testing data to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in addition to daily reporting regarding bed capacity and supplies to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) COVID-19 Patient Impact and Hospital Capacity Module.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency with oversight of America’s Medicare-participating healthcare providers—including hospitals—is helping the Trump Administration obtain this key information to help identify supply and bed capacity needs, as well as enhance COVID-19 surveillance efforts. Hospitals will report data without personal identifying information to ensure patient privacy, according to agency officials.
“The nation’s nearly 4,700 hospitals have access to testing data that’s updated daily. This data will help us better support hospitals to address their supply and capacity needs, as well as strengthen our surveillance efforts across the country,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Pence, is already collecting data from public health labs and private laboratory companies, but does not have data from hospital labs that conduct laboratory testing in their hospital, according to federal officials. This hospital data is needed at the federal level to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and CDC in their efforts to support states and localities in addressing and responding to the virus, they added.
More specifically, officials contended that academic, university and hospital “in-house” labs are performing thousands of COVID-19 tests each day, but unlike private laboratories, the full results are not shared with government agencies working to track and analyze the virus.
In the letter, Pence asked all hospitals to report data on COVID-19 testing performed in their in-house laboratories, which are hospitals’ onsite laboratories. Because private and commercial laboratories already report, the letter is not applicable to them.
