Hospitals throughout the United States now have the opportunity to join a national Web-based surveillance network that will enable them to track—and possibly prevent—safety problems facing patients and staff in their facilities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially launched the National Healthcare Safety Network in 2005 with about 600 select facilities participating. Now, the agency is opening this voluntary surveillance and reporting system to all US hospitals and outpatient dialysis centers.
The network was designed to collect and analyze data on health care–associated adverse events from a sample of health care facilities to enable the agency to identify trends in such events, gauge adherence to prevention strategies, evaluate the efficacy of prevention strategies, and conduct multifacility studies. It also was intended to help facilities identify and address their own problems in a timely manner, and to provide them with comparative data from other facilities. In . . . [Full Text of this Article]
