Impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on US Hospitals and Patients, April-July 2020.

OBJECTIVE: The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) throughout key regions of the United States in early 2020 placed a premium on timely, national surveillance of hospital patient censuses. To meet that need, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), the nation's largest hospital surveillance system, launched a module for collecting hospital coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) data. We present time-series estimates of the critical hospital capacity indicators from April 1 to July 14, 2020. DESIGN: From March 27 to July 14, 2020, the NHSN collected daily data on hospital bed occupancy, number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19, and the availability and/or use of mechanical ventilators. Time series were constructed using multiple imputation and survey weighting to allow near-real-time daily national and state estimates to be computed. RESULTS: During the pandemic's April peak in the United States, among an estimated 431,000 total inpatients, 84,000 (19%) had COVID-19. Although the number of inpatients with COVID-19 decreased from April to July, the proportion of occupied inpatient beds increased steadily. COVID-19 hospitalizations increased from mid-June in the South and Southwest regions after stay-at-home restrictions were eased. The proportion of inpatients with COVID-19 on ventilators decreased from April to July. CONCLUSIONS: The NHSN hospital capacity estimates served as important, near-real-time indicators of the pandemic's magnitude, spread, and impact, providing quantitative guidance for the public health response. Use of the estimates detected the rise of hospitalizations in specific geographic regions in June after they declined from a peak in April. Patient outcomes appeared to improve from early April to mid-July.

Hospital capacities and shortages of healthcare resources among US hospitals during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), March 27-July 14, 2020.

During March 27-July 14, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network extended its surveillance to hospital capacities responding to COVID-19 pandemic. The data showed wide variations across hospitals in case burden, bed occupancies, ventilator usage, and healthcare personnel and supply status. These data were used to inform emergency responses.

Building an Interactive Geospatial Visualization Application for National Health Care-Associated Infection Surveillance: Development Study.

BACKGROUND: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is the most widely used health care-associated infection (HAI) and antimicrobial use and resistance surveillance program in the United States. Over 37,000 health care facilities participate in the program and submit a large volume of surveillance data. These data are used by the facilities themselves, the CDC, and other agencies and organizations for a variety of purposes, including infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship, and clinical quality measurement. Among the summary metrics made available by the NHSN are standardized infection ratios, which are used to identify HAI prevention needs and measure progress at the national, regional, state, and local levels. OBJECTIVE: To extend the use of geospatial methods and tools to NHSN data, and in turn to promote and inspire new uses of the rendered data for analysis and prevention purposes, we developed a web-enabled system that enables integrated visualization of HAI metrics and supporting data. METHODS: We leveraged geocoding and visualization technologies that are readily available and in current use to develop a web-enabled system designed to support visualization and interpretation of data submitted to the NHSN from geographically dispersed sites. The server-client model-based system enables users to access the application via a web browser. RESULTS: We integrated multiple data sets into a single-page dashboard designed to enable users to navigate across different HAI event types, choose specific health care facility or geographic locations for data displays, and scale across time units within identified periods. We launched the system for internal CDC use in January 2019. CONCLUSIONS: CDC NHSN statisticians, data analysts, and subject matter experts identified opportunities to extend the use of geospatial methods and tools to NHSN data and provided the impetus to develop NHSNViz. The development effort proceeded iteratively, with the developer adding or enhancing functionality and including additional data sets in a series of prototype versions, each of which incorporated user feedback. The initial production version of NHSNViz provides a new geospatial analytic resource built in accordance with CDC user requirements and extensible to additional users and uses in subsequent versions.