Trigger codes for electronic transmission of Health Care Surveys to PHA

[Uzair Rasheed]

Can anyone share from where can I get trigger codes against which Health Care Surveys will be sent to PHA. What are the trigger conditions on which health care survey XML of a patient will be generated ? Anything specified by NHCS ?

[Brian Gugerty]

Uzair Rasheed,

Sorry for this delayed response. The NHCS Implementation Guide (IG) Release 1.2 is per se silent on trigger codes against which Health Care Surveys will be sent to a PHA.  Having said that, all three document-level templates in the IG contain clinical and other information that is encounter-based. That is—as an example which also can apply to the other two document-level templates--the Emergency Department Encounter template is populated by data that pertains to the target patient Emergency Department encounter.  Therefore, a trigger that makes sense to the functionality of the EHR or HIT module such as ‘close of encounter’ or ‘provider sign-off on encounter’ may be used.  NCHS does request laboratory results that are obtained or ordered during the encounter so a lag time of 48 hours after the trigger that most makes sense for the implementation, such as ‘close of encounter’, should be used as a reasonable time to have the results available in the encounter data although it is not mandatory.

Regards,

Brian

Brian Gugerty DNS, RN

Senior Service Fellow

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)

Division of Health Care Statistics (DHCS)

e-mail: va...@cdc.gov