(Hospital focused session) Upcoming All-Hazards Hospital Essential Elements of Information Listening Sessions

Background: To date, there has been a limited unified, all-hazards understanding of national-level hospital facility status, capacity, resources, and capabilities. Existing efforts have included the COVID-19/influenza/bed occupancy hospital data, ad-hoc surveys performed after incidents such as hurricanes, targeted surveillance systems for specific communicable diseases and/or specific types of care (ex., ED visits), and individual efforts within jurisdictions. While each existing effort has been successful independently, collection efforts are patchwork, often created during the crisis, and not standardized with different essential elements of information (EEIs) that are not optimally coordinated for driving action. In other words, a comprehensive, standardized view of the healthcare system’s state that can be shared across partners at all levels does not yet exist. Our mission is to develop a national, vendor-neutral, all-hazards standard set of EEIs and collection mechanisms for hospital data that drive action for all-hazards emergency preparedness and response.

Intent: To host multiple phased listening sessions to seek input across healthcare on hospitals’ all-hazards EEIs, helping to identify the most effective path forward. This is a nationwide effort co-led by ASPR, CDC, CMS, and ONC, where input is critical to ensure success. Stakeholders will include jurisdictions, hospital associations, hospitals, health care coalitions, medical operations coordination centers, transfer centers, health care coalitions, nurses, EMS, health IT, and more.