Electronic Public Health Reporting among Non-Federal Acute Care Hospitals During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2021

Excerpt

Hospitals play an important role in support of public health functions by contributing timely and accurate data to state and local public health agencies (PHAs). However, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed substantive gaps in our public health infrastructure. To ensure that PHAs have the information they need for effective disease surveillance and pandemic response, national efforts are underway to incentivize electronic public health reporting and improve methods of health information exchange between the healthcare delivery system and PHAs. This data brief uses nationally representative survey data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Information Technology (IT) supplement to describe hospitals’ engagement towards electronically submitting data for public health reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. This descriptive analysis provides context for some of the challenges hospitals experienced with public health reporting in 2019 and sheds light on hospitals’ current capacity to support ongoing pandemic response efforts and future public health emergencies.