The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is updating the COVID-19 vaccination form for long-term care providers.
Providers submitting their shots data on the National Health Care Safety Network will soon see the updates, experts with the CDC said Wednesday. The changes are an effort to simplify the reporting process for providers.
They detailed the upcoming changes during a national stakeholder call with nursing home providers hosted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The agency is removing vaccine manufacturer categories, which applies to both the primary vaccine series and additional doses/booster questions. It’s also removing vaccine supply questions from the form.
In addition, the CDC will be adding a question asking about the number of residents who have received one or multiple booster doses. Across all forms, the agency is adding a question on the cumulative number of individuals who are up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccines.
“Up-to-date is currently defined as having received a booster dose. Or if you have not received a booster, you’ve received your complete primary series of an mRNA vaccine in the last five months or you’ve received your single dose of Janssen in the last two months,” the official explained.
The NHSN vaccination form updates will be made May 19 and will be seen by users on May 23.
The agency also discussed a new, optional tool with the NHSN update, the Event-Level Vaccination COVID-19 Reporting Tool for long-term care facilities.
The CDC official explained facilities will continue to submit cumulative weekly COVID-19 vaccination data to the weekly modules. Data can be reported in several ways, including directly into the data entry screens and .CSV upload into the weekly modules.
The newest, optional tool allows providers to use the event-level vaccination forms, select ‘view reporting summary and submit’ button to submit the data to the weekly modules.
The tool is used to record individual resident and healthcare personnel vaccination information in NHSN and the application then calculates the weekly summary totals.
“This is a new and improved version of the excel data tracking worksheets that are currently posted on the NHSN website … but we are retiring those excel worksheets now that this tool is built into NHSN,” the CDC official said.
