With care organizations needing to report aggregated facility-level COVID vaccination and infection data for patients and healthcare personnel to CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), one care organization effectively streamlined and automated its public health data reporting.

In a recent EHR Intelligence article, Fresenius Medical Care North America was able to automate this reporting to drive patient-centered care and mitigate clinician burden – saving each of its clinic 8 hours of reporting per week.

“We submit and upload the data electronically,” said Emel Hamilton, vice president of government reporting and clinical informatics at Fresenius Medical Care North America, in the article. “It's extracted on the back end from various clinical and inventory management systems. We then apply special logic and massage the data to what CDC needs, and it's uploaded into the appropriate systems.”

The article also discusses how big data can help stakeholders understand which patients develop serious illnesses and which populations are most susceptible to the virus. It also highlights how the government can layer geographic information on top of COVID-19 data to identify hotspots so it can launch appropriate mitigation strategies to address those individual circumstances.

The outcomes of this effort were significant.

“It's a huge amount of savings when you look at 2,700 clinics across the nation for Fresenius Clinics,” added Hamilton. “The electronic data submission and extraction has helped us meet these obligations readily.”

Fresenius also added COVID-19 vaccination and infection information to its continuity of care document and leveraged its existing health information exchange (HIE) connection. The organization is connected to the nation's largest interoperability framework, Carequality, through CommonWell Health Alliance.

Finally in the article, Hamilton discusses how the pandemic was the tipping point for advancing health data interoperability.

“The recent pandemic experience disrupted the traditional internally focused ways healthcare organizations look at data,” she said. “Instead, it highlighted the importance of interoperability information sharing, and a collaborative approach to solving public health problems.”

RosettaHealth can assist with any health information challenges you might have, book a free consultation with one of our interoperability experts.