Seventy thousand hospital infections prevented in one year

The National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is **the nation's most
widely used healthcare-associated infection tracking system**. It gives
facilities, states, regions and the country the data needed to **identify
problem areas, measure the progress of prevention efforts, and ultimately
eliminate healthcare-associated infections.**

The number

More than 70,000 hospital-acquired infections were prevented in 2024,
according to the most recent HAI Annual Progress Report.

Seventy thousand infections that did not happen. That figure only exists
because somebody counted the ones that did, consistently, across thousands of
facilities, for years — which is what makes a surveillance system worth its
administrative cost.

What else it tracks

Beyond infections, NHSN lets healthcare facilities track:

• Blood safety errors
• Healthcare process measures, such as **healthcare personnel influenza
  vaccine status** and infection control adherence rates
• Antimicrobial use and resistance — which also satisfies **CMS Promoting
  Interoperability requirements**
• COVID-19 reporting and vaccination, for all healthcare facilities

That last category of process measures is the quiet one. An infection rate
tells you the outcome; adherence rates tell you why, and are the thing a
hospital can act on next week.

Why reporting is worth a facility's effort

There is a practical incentive built in: reporting antimicrobial use and
resistance through NHSN fulfils a federal regulatory requirement. A
surveillance system that also discharges an obligation the facility already
has is one that gets used.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.