Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

With the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) over for more than a month, it’s not surprising that the feds have relocated or stopped tracking some data.

Details: As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updates its COVID resources, you should expect changes. For example, the agency will still track hospital admissions numbers and patients presenting to emergency departments with the virus; however, it’s using a different metric to determine death statistics, the CDC says on its website.

Three things have been removed from the data repository including:

• COVID-19 case data. The CDC has removed this information as “some states and jurisdictions may no longer collect case data, testing results are sometimes not reported, or some individuals skip testing all together,” making the results unreliable, the agency says.
• National and county positivity rates. Lab requirements to report results ended with the PHE.
• V-safe tracking. “CDC will continue to monitor COVID-19 vaccines through its other established vaccine safety monitoring systems. V-safe users or others who get vaccinated can report any possible health problems or adverse events following vaccination to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,” the agency notes.

Resource: Find out more at www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of-phe.html.