Hospital Worker Vaccination Rate Data Withheld Until October

The Biden administration says it will hold back data on how many hospital workers are vaccinated until October 2022.

Meanwhile, patients across the country continue to delay medical care over fear of catching the virus in hospitals.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has three months-worth of data on vaccination rates that it started requiring hospitals to submit Oct. 1, 2021. “CMS will not be updating this measure with quarterly refreshes until the agency has a full year of data in October 2022,” a CMS spokesperson said in an email.

The agency said it takes time to collect the data, analyze it, and get it ready for public viewing. Advocates say the data, even if incomplete, could help patients make informed decisions about the risks associated with visiting a hospital.

“Failing to release data about the vaccination status of healthcare workers in hospitals is yet another way in which federal public health authorities have failed chronically ill, immunocompromised, disabled, and older Americans,” said Matthew Cortland, a senior resident fellow at Data for Progress working on disability and health care.

Health-care workers across the U.S. are required to be vaccinated for Covid-19 under a mandate from the Biden administration. But the requirement’s rollout has been delayed and disjointed due to legal action. Hospitals also have a lot of leeway to accept religious exemptions, which could mean higher rates of unvaccinated workers.

Many hospitals lack booster mandates, so workers could be long past the optimal effectiveness of their primary vaccine series.

Without the data, vulnerable patients “are not being given the information they need from health-care facilities to make informed choices about their care,” Cortland said.

Data Lag

The data “will be helpful to many patients, including those who are at high-risk for developing serious complications from COVID-19, as they choose facilities from which to seek treatment,” the CMS said in the final rule implementing the measure.

“There’s always a lag between when CMS collects the data and when they make it public,” said Akin Demehin, director of policy at the American Hospital Association.

Facilities typically have “several months” to report the data, a spokesperson for the CMS said. After that, the agency evaluates the data, provides hospitals feedback on their performance, and allows them to review the data before it is published.

The CMS already distributes data on staff vaccination for Medicare- and Medicaid- certified nursing homes, collected via a requirement the agency put out in May, the spokesperson said.

“The CDC has emphasized that health care settings, including long-term care settings, can be high-risk places for COVID-19 exposure and transmission,” the CMS said.

However, Covid-19 transmission generally happens between health-care workers. “Having a highly vaccinated workforce decreases the risk of transmission among them and the potential severe consequences of Covid-19,” said Jorge Luis Salinas, a hospital epidemiologist at Stanford University.

Personal protective equipment is quite effective in hospitals, but health-care workers could still get sick in their communities or transmit the virus in break rooms, said Mary Hayden, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Rush Medical College, in an interview.

“We know CMS wants to make sure they’re giving the public as accurate a set of data as they can,” Demehin said.

But “it should not take a year to do that,” Cortland said.

Overlapping Measures

The CMS announced it would begin collecting hospital staff vaccination data well before the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers was announced. It also came when vaccines were widely available, but before any vaccine was fully approved by the FDA.

Some hospitals questioned the requirement to track staffers’ vaccination rates since it was the first time they were asked for such data. The reporting requirement is one of hundreds of quality measures hospitals paid by the CMS are asked to hand over.

Part of what has made implementation smooth is that it’s similar to an existing measure that tracks flu vaccination, Demehin said. It also dovetails the CMS vaccine mandate.

“Both of these create a very, very strong signal and incentive to hospitals to vaccinate as much of their staff as possible,” Demehin said.

Still, hospitals could have varying rates of unvaccinated workers due to being overly accepting of religious exemptions or slow to comply with the mandate.

Hospitals are required to report staff vaccination data during one week each month. At the end of each quarter, the CMS said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will calculate a vaccination rate for each hospital and publicly report it.

Monthly reporting by hospitals “will help patients and their caregivers identify hospitals that have potential issues with vaccine confidence or slow uptake among staff,” the CMS said.

The data “could be one data point that patients look to to understand whether that hospital is where they want to seek their care,” Demehin said.