The American Hospital Association sent a letter Aug. 12 urging the Consumer Product Safety Commission to keep hospital participation voluntary as the agency modernizes the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.
The letter, addressed to CPSC Chairman Peter Feldman and Secretary Alberta Mills, responds to the commission’s request for comment on its fiscal year 2027 and 2028 agenda and priorities.
NEISS has operated as a voluntary program since the 1970s, collecting emergency department data on injuries tied to consumer products. Becker’s reported in July that the CPSC’s modernization effort, known as NEISS-R, would replace the agency’s manual coding process with an automated system that pulls data from hospitals’ electronic health records and exchanges it through a CPSC-designated Qualified Health Information Network.
CPSC then began contacting health systems, including Detroit-based Henry Ford Health and Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health, requesting identifiable emergency room records, the same privacy concern AHA raises in its new letter. AHA said hospitals have received outreach from CPSC’s data vendor suggesting participation is required, and it warned the agency may shift from deidentified to personally identifiable patient data.
AHA asked CPSC to limit data collection to the minimum necessary for injury surveillance and to hold a formal notice-and-comment period before finalizing any changes. The association tied its call for voluntary participation to the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, writing that the approach would support “regulatory relief instead of adding new requirements.” Stacey Hughes, AHA executive vice president of government affairs and public policy, signed the letter.
The letter marks AHA’s first formal comment on the NEISS overhaul since CPSC began contacting individual hospitals for emergency room data in July.
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