Influenza vaccination of health care personnel: Experiences with the first year of a national data collection effort

Background The purpose of this project was to evaluate a standardized measure of health care personnel (HCP) influenza vaccination during the first year of implementation. The measure requires acute care hospitals to gather vaccination status data from employees, licensed independent practitioners (LIPs), and adult students/trainees and volunteers. The evaluation included a hospital sampling frame stratified by 4 United States Census Bureau Regions and hospital bed count. The hospitals were selected within strata using simple random sampling and the probability proportional to size method, without replacement. Methods Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted. Two qualitative data analysts independently coded each interview, and data were synthesized using a thematic analysis. This evaluation took place at hospitals reporting HCP influenza vaccination data as part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program. Participants included the staff at 46 hospitals who were knowledgeable about data collection to fulfill IQR program requirements. Results Facilitators of data collection included having a small number of HCP, having a data collection system already in place, and providing HCP with advance notice of data collection. Major challenges included the absence of an established tracking process and monitoring HCP not regularly working in the facility, particularly LIPs. More than half of the facilities noted the time- and/or resource-intensive nature of data collection. Most facilities used data collected to meet other reporting requirements beyond the IQR Program. Conclusions Hospitals implemented a range of data collection methods to comply with reporting requirements. Lessons learned from the first year of measure implementation can be used to enhance data collection practices across HCP groups for future influenza seasons.