GAO: HHS Weak on Infection Data

April 18, 2008

The Government Accountability Office is calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to prioritize efforts to improve data collection on hospital acquired infections and ways to prevent them. The GAO is an investigative arm of Congress.

In a new report published on April 16, the GAO noted that three HHS agencies—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality--have four separate programs to collect information on hospital acquired infections in separate databases.

“Each of these databases presents only a partial view of the extent of the HAI problem because each focuses its data collection on selected types of HAIs and collects data from a different subset of patients across the country,” according to the GAO report. “Although officials from the various HHS agencies discuss HAI data collection with each other, we did not find that the agencies were taking steps to integrate any of the existing data by creating linkages across the databases, such as creating common patient identifiers. Creating linkages across the HAI-related databases could enhance the availability of information to better understand where and how HAIs occur.”

Consequently, the GAO questioned the reliability of HHS national estimates of the prevalence of hospital-acquired infections. In response to the report, HHS officials acknowledged the need for greater consistency and compatibility of collected data. Full text of the report, “Health Care-Associated Infections in Hospitals: Leadership Needed from HHS to Prioritize Prevention Practices and Improve Data on These Infections,” is available at gao.gov.

Data Repositories Archive
Disease Management Archive
Policies/Regulation Archive
Hospitals Archive

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