National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN)

The Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP) is part of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, in CDC’s Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases. The mission of DHQP is to protect patients, protect healthcare personnel, and promote safety, quality, and value in the healthcare delivery system by providing national leadership for nine key areas:

• Healthcare outcomes,
• Outbreaks in healthcare settings,
• Emerging antimicrobial-resistant infections,
• Efficacy of new interventions for patient safety,
• Clinical microbiology laboratory quality,
• Water quality in healthcare settings,
• Cost effectiveness of prevention interventions,
• Promotion of implementation and evaluation of prevention interventions, and
• Development of infection control guidelines and policies.

DHQP is organized into three main components: the Epidemiology and Laboratory Branch, the Prevention and Evaluation Branch, and the Healthcare Outcomes Branch.

Clinical Epidemiology and Infection Prevention has been a part of the CDC National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance System since the late 1960’s. This has now become a part of the Healthcare Outcomes Branch (HOB).

The HOB conducts surveillance, research, and demonstration projects to measure the impact of healthcare-associated infections, adverse drug events, and other complications of healthcare. HOB staff work closely with healthcare practitioners and healthcare facilities and with partners in other federal agencies, accrediting bodies, and professional groups. A major initiative currently underway in HOB is the launch of the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), a web-based system for monitoring healthcare-associated adverse events. 

The National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is a knowledge system for accumulating, exchanging and integrating relevant information on infectious and noninfectious adverse events associated with healthcare delivery. The NHSN allows entry (manual and electronic) of event and summary (denominator) data for each data-reporting module in the network. The data analysis features of the network range from simple reports and graphs to statistical analysis that compare the healthcare facility's rates with national performance measures.

View the NHSN Patient Safety Component Protocol below for definitions of healthcare-associated infections, each module contains specific events (i.e. bloodstream infection) and definitions for that event.