Advisory Panel May Urge HHS To Step Up Efforts To Track Hospital Worker Flu Shots

A federal advisory panel is discussing whether to recommend that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) urge the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to step up their efforts to standardize methods of reporting health care worker influenza vaccination rates to a government-run database and impose stiff enough penalties to ensure hospitals comply. The issue arises as CMS prepares to roll out a new rule next year that requires acute care hospitals to adopt a new quality measure for reporting the data to CDC or face a 2