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Preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) is a priority for The Joint Commission. Despite being largely preventable, an estimated 633,300 patients contract HAIs each year, and they result in about 72,000 annual deaths and have an estimated direct medical cost of $28.4 billion per year. The HAI infection rate increased significantly between 2019 and 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We have prioritized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) system as a data source to  evaluate patient safety and clinicial clinical quality performance by Joint Commission-accredited hospitals. The majority of Joint Commission accredited hospitals already participate in NHSN as a requirement under CMS programs. There are several measures collected through NHSN applications that are currently included in the Accelerate PI dashboards. However, these data come from the publicly available CMS Compare website where the data can be 18-24 months old. Sharing NHSN data will allow us to include more recent data in Accelerate PI dashboards and identify quality improvement opportunities more efficiently