Purpose
Per NSSP policy, any facilities that fail to send data for visits that occurred in the past 90 days will be deactivated. Outreach occurs beforehand to determine whether deactivation is appropriate. This is essential to support data quality and ensure the Master Facility Table (MFT) remains up to date. This guide can help site administrators navigate the process, which starts with an email notification.
Email alert prior to deactivation
NSSP sends email alerts to sites when facilities have failed to send data for 30 days, and again at 90 days. These alerts are part of an ongoing effort to improve data quality and make sure your site’s Master Facility Table (MFT) is current.
The emails will have a subject line reading: "WARNING: Facilities at Risk of Deactivation." These messages are generated on the second day of each month. They contain tables listing:
- Facilities at risk of deactivation.
- Facilities deactivated the previous month. The status of these facilities has been updated in the MFT to Inactive, Pending OB (onboarding) Review. This change in status does not affect data processing. Facility data will continue to process in the production environment until the onboarding team finalizes the deactivation.
The MFT is vital because it contains all necessary information for processing site data. Each site has its own MFT, and all sites follow the same standards and are required to provide the same details when adding a new facility. The information in your MFT helps ensure that data from your facilities are mapped correctly to the BioSense Platform and are easily identifiable when data are queried there.
Keep your MFT current
Steps to take following an alert
Here’s what to do if you receive an alert:
- Review the identified facilities for accuracy.
- Be prepared to work with the NSSP onboarding team. Before completing the facility deactivation, the team contacts site administrators to determine whether the facilities should be inactive or if ongoing work will allow data transmittal to resume. If facilities are inactive, the onboarding team will work with the site administrator to update the MFT facility status value to Inactive and enter the reason in the comment field.
Three outreach attempts
The NSSP onboarding team will make three attempts to contact site administrators and confirm facility status before finalizing the deactivation. We will alert individuals whose names are checked beside Onboarding Communications on the Access & Management Center (AMC) User Profile page. (See the AMC Quick Start Guide, Section 4: Manage User Profile—Site-specific Communications.)
If a site administrator does not want the facilities deactivated and anticipates that data submission will resume, the site administrator may request to set the status to Onboarding until site personnel are ready to onboard.
If the site administrator does not respond, the facility deactivation will be accepted on the last business day of the month.
Resolve issues before deadline
The deactivation process
The deactivation process includes the following MFT updates:
- Facility Status: Inactive
- Review Reason: Status change from Active
- Review Status: Pending OB Approval
- Addition to the onboarding comment field: “This facility was deactivated per the 90-day policy.”
If these facilities become active again, the onboarding process must be repeated to confirm data quality is at acceptable levels.
This process is supported by an NSSP policy that is intended to help ensure that the MFT is a true representation of facilities that send data to the BioSense Platform and that the current NSSP participation map (available on About NSSP) is an accurate depiction.