OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH SAFETY NETWORK (OHSN)

What is the Concept for the OHSN?

The OHSN is a new voluntary and secure electronic occupational safety and health surveillance system being developed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The first version of OHSN is limited to the healthcare sector (Healthcare Sector Component), but we envision that OHSN will be expanded to other industry sectors in the future. The OHSN Healthcare Sector Component focuses on non-infectious occupational safety and health issues among healthcare personnel (HCP), starting with a HCP Traumatic Injury Module. In addressing occupational health and safety within the Healthcare Sector, NIOSH is working with the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Healthcare Personnel Safety Component, which includes modules to track infectious disease issues among healthcare personnel (e.g., Blood/Body Fluids Exposure, Influenza Vaccination). For information concerning patient and healthcare personnel surveillance systems managed by CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion see The National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) webpage at http://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/hps.html.

The diagram below summarizes how OHSN works.

Healthcare Sector Component

By providing standard data collection and analysis protocols, the OHSN will promote “meaningful use” of employee health and safety data, analogous to “meaningful use” of electronic health records in the clinical arena. The first version of the OHSN will be limited to the healthcare sector, but modules that address other industry sectors may be added in the future. Enrollment will be open in 2012 to all types of ambulatory and inpatient healthcare facilities in the United States, including but not limited to acute care hospitals, long term acute care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient dialysis centers, ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient clinics and long term care facilities.

OHSN makes use of advances in information technology. While maintaining data security and integrity, OHSN has the capacity to share data in a timely manner between participating healthcare facilities and NIOSH to improve the safety and health of healthcare personnel. NIOSH collaborated with software vendors and healthcare facilities to create standard data elements and value sets that will prevent duplication of efforts at the facility level. In addition, we are working with private sector vendors so facilities collecting data using commercially-available systems will be able to voluntarily upload those data electronically into OHSN.

In summary, OHSN will harmonize core occupational health data elements into one surveillance system to integrate the existing patchwork of occupational safety and health surveillance activities within individual healthcare facilities into a uniform surveillance strategy. At the institutional level, OHSN will simplify facilities’ data entry demands; while, at the national level, OHSN will help achieve the goal of widespread compatibility in occupational safety and health surveillance data among U.S. healthcare facilities. The OHSN system will allow individual facilities to directly compare (“benchmark”) their experiences against aggregate data from other facilities, and thus to use their surveillance data more effectively to enhance prevention programs.

Purposes of OHSN:

• Serve as a surveillance resource for U.S. workplaces
• Analyze and report workplace-specific and aggregated data to illustrate the magnitude of injury and illness events among workers and to monitor trends in these events

Benefits to Workplaces Participating in OHSN

• Ability to benchmark a workplace’s internal rates and trends against aggregate data from similar workplaces
• Assistance from NIOSH in comparing patterns of injuries (e.g., types of healthcare personnel involved, risk factors, circumstances causing injuries), and identifying the most promising prevention strategies
• Ability to assess the impact of prevention efforts on occupational health and safety over time
• Identification of effective and innovative intervention tools shared by NIOSH and other OHSN participating facilities
• Provide a forum for a community of leaders and champions from healthcare facilities and NIOSH to share lessons learned about preventing traumatic injuries among healthcare personnel
• Provide a method for healthcare facilities to track their own data to meet regulatory and accreditation requirements of OSHA and The Joint Commission

Confidentiality

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has managed many national occupational surveillance systems. NIOSH will maintain data security and integrity. NIOSH will ensure that data from facilities will be used only in aggregate for the stated purposes of analyzing data without personal or hospital identifiers.

How data will be used?

Data collected in OHSN will be used for improving worker safety at the local and national levels. At the national level, NIOSH will analyze and publish surveillance data, in aggregate and without personal or hospital identifiers, to estimate and characterize the national burden of healthcare-associated injuries. At the local level, the data analysis features of OHSN will enable participating facilities to produce rate tables and graphs that compare the individual healthcare facility’s rates with the national aggregate metrics.