I'm Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, and I'd like to share how we're improving patient safety, saving lives, and reducing healthcare costs using CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, or NHSN. NHSN is the nation's most widely used tracking and response system across healthcare. The data are used to identify, investigate, and prevent threats and improve care, including healthcare-associated infections, antimicrobial-resistant infections, recommendations for safe antibiotic use, and emerging diseases like COVID-19. Healthcare-associated infections are often preventable. They not only cost billions of dollars annually, but they can even cost lives. I've witnessed this firsthand in my clinical experience.

NHSN’s data guide prevention efforts and help save partners like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services millions of dollars. Over the years, CDC has made great progress increasing NHSN participation across hospitals, dialysis facilities, nursing homes, and ambulatory surgical centers, and now serves more than 38,000 healthcare facilities. Making healthcare safer starts with having reliable and robust data. NHSN data are key to reducing infections, monitoring healthcare system capacity, and stopping the spread of emerging and enduring threats.