The Consumer Product Safety Commission is seeking to require some hospitals to participate in its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), the nation’s principal system for tracking consumer product-related injuries.

Currently relying on manual review and coding of medical records from roughly 70 of the nation’s more than 5,000 hospital emergency departments, the agency has announced that it will expand its surveillance network across all 50 states and to about 100 hospitals and health systems.

Under the updated program, NEISS-R would exchange data with participating hospitals through federally designated Qualified Health Information Networks in an effort to strengthen the CPSC’s ability to detect product hazards.  It would search for accident-related diagnosis codes and identify patients who may have experienced a consumer product-related accident.  For identified accidents, a contractor hired by the CPSC would gather additional patient clinical information and provide it to the CPSC for follow-up.

The CPSC’s contractor has written to hospitals requesting timely meetings to begin integrating their organizations into NEISS-R.  Its letter states that participation in the program is mandatory, and one report suggests that failure to do so could subject hospitals to penalties under federal laws banning information blocking.

Critics of the program’s expansion question the agency’s authority to require participation without formal notice and a corresponding public comment period; some hospitals believe the data reporting, which includes identifying information for individual patients, violates federal privacy laws; and some hospitals – including some large health systems – have reportedly replied to the letters by indicating that they refuse to participate.

Learn more from this CPSC news release; a sample letter sent by the agency’s contractor to a hospital; the KFF Health News article “Trump Administration Demands Hospitals Share Emergency Room Records;” and the Modern Healthcare report “Trump administration demands hospitals share ER records” (subscription required).