By Dan Hounsell

As any facility manager knows, it’s tough to manage what you can’t measure. In the case of federal efforts to inspect hospitals in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in 2020, it’s tough to control an infection you don't look for.

A federal watchdog found the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) lacked the authority to ensure accredited hospitals had appropriate emerging infectious disease preparedness plans in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Fierce Healthcare.

In a recent report, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found that CMS was only able to request, not require, that private accreditation organizations perform the special targeted infection control surveys among the 4,200 hospitals to which they provide accreditation.

These accreditation organizations suspended normal reaccreditation surveys and had not performed any of the requested surveys as of January 2021, the inspector general wrote, noting that a fraction of accredited hospitals were still surveyed last year by state survey agencies but that these and other mitigation efforts did not come close to achieving the agency’s overall emerging disease preparedness goal.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia didn’t perform the inspections, one of 13 states that did not comply, according to the inspector general’s report.