HHS Diagnostic Antigen Testing Machine Delivery to LTCF - ELR reporting?

Agreed.  Iowa is distributing 1 CSV template to everyone (not the national version) that we had to distribute much earlier than when the national one became available.  

Some of our partners (very few) are able to perfectly meet that specification, so after a quick 1-2 minute visual review, we drop those into a folder and Rhapsody picks it up for automatic processing.

For those that cannot meet our specification perfectly, we've set up a customized 2-sheet transformation in Excel: 1 sheet is where we drop the in-bound data exactly as it comes in; the other sheet transfers data using formulas and vlookup from the first sheet to meet our specification perfectly. We may need to add CLIA#s, translate values like race, ethnicity, test & result values into coded values, data formatting, etc. So this is customized based on sender - easier to do this than create so many Rhapsody mappers.... and we can recruit additional staff familiar with Excel if/when it's necessary.

This has been manageable so far, but not sure if this approach will work if we get flooded with a large number of LTC facilites, which may be pretty low-tech & low-tech savvy (very little experience with spreadsheets) reporters.

In TN, we set up a POC reporting registration portal in REDCap to get an idea of how many people would register. The registration has been open for 3 weeks and 232 different reporters have registered for POC reporting. We attempt to get as many as we can to submit using Excel, but many need to report manually because of a lack of technical resources and personnel.

From that registration survey, we are able to pre-populate another REDCap project with the reporter/facility/provider information for results reporting. Since early August, we have received nearly 4000 POC results. It is taking about 1-2 minutes to manually enter a result. The reporters only need to complete the patient demographics and result everything else is pre-populated for them.

The results are pulled automatically from REDCap using R hourly and translated into a format Rhapsody can consume. Then imported into NBS.

Hi folks, posting on behalf of Dan Pollock is who having some troubles replying to the discussion thread:

Hello Everyone:

FYI, CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is moving forward with plans to enable nursing homes to report point-of-care COVID-19 test data to NHSN.  Over 15,000 nursing homes nationwide are now enrolled in NHSN as a result of a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) COVID-19 reporting requirement introduced in May 2020.  This comprehensive participation of nursing homes in NHSN provides an opportunity to extend surveillance coverage to POC test data in a timely way.  Our plans are to (1) provide a means for nursing homes to report POC test data to NHSN, (2) enable state and local health departments to gain access to those data in the NHSN application (using the NHSN Group Function), and (3) to introduce a data export feature that will enable use of HL7 ELR messages to convey the POC data from NHSN via the AIMS Platform to state and local health departments.   NHSN’s nursing home POC test data surveillance is at an early stage of planning and development.  We will be glad to discuss our plans with you on a call, and we will gladly include everyone’s input to the fullest extent.            

Thanks,

Dan

Hi Brooke et al,
Looks like we have some topics for next week.

1. Agree as always with Mark and John that we also distribute the 'local' template we have. I have not made the push to update with variables from the universal, but going out soon. May not be able to get much but if we can at least get some consistency for what we really need that will be something. Licensing is the same for CT as in PA. And LTCF are not the only POC locations getting antigen testing set up (testing that as of now means that negatives should be confirmed with another test which will not happen). These urgent care/doc in the box centers have never been good reporters, and generate a file -- hahaha! And now private schools others are setting up testing as well. The Coast Guard Academy has no computer system, so they cannot even generate a file for us. So we still need to deal with paper reports.

2. Would be interested in seeing TN's approach and who/how they identified POC to contact for that. While not all of us have RedCap in use, the ideas would be useful.

3. Per NHSN -- I am only interested if the LTCF messages get pushed to AIMS and then to us. I am not going to add another layer of data chasing, nor do I need our HAI programs - who helped nursing homes get set up with NHSN reporting (didn't HHS just change that to TeleHealth?)  - to be an internal source of data unless it is in a usable format.

There must be a better way. OR we need to stop worrying about data from LTCF going into our surveillance systems, and also have POC at least report positives to LHDs who have access to our contact tracing system and get updates back from that system. Something has got to give.

Is anyone on this message thread that might be able to reach out to CMS and get two columns added to the Point_Of_Care_Device_Allocation Excel spreadsheet?

The file can be downloaded from this site and sorted by state: