The Consumer Product Safety Commission has spent decades telling hospitals a simple thing about injury reporting: leave the patient's identity out of it. The agency's own 214-page coding manual instructs hospitals not to include identifiable information "such as names, birthdates, or addresses" when reporting cases, and reserves identifiers for the follow-up investigations that account for fewer than one percent of reports.
Its new surveillance program asks for the opposite. According to documents and emails obtained by KFF Health News and published on July 27, a CPSC official has insisted that participating hospitals provide identifiable information for all emergency room patients, including names, addresses and diagnoses, to a private contractor called Konza Health. The agency wants at least 100 hospitals sending detailed records by the end of this year.
