The data feeds will be used to determine how many beds at a hospital are filled, how fast a disease is spreading and if the CDC's interventions are working, he added.

The CDC declined to identify the hospitals participating in the program.

The effort is part of the CDC's BioSense initiative, which was launched to improve the detection and situational awareness of national catastrophic events.

The project will work in tandem with a program for early event detection that uses data from U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and other U.S. Department of Defense health care providers to determine whether an event is occurring, according to Rhodes. The event-detection program is also part of the BioSense initiative. Eric Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said that BioSense will replace the current paper-based process under which hospitals first report anomalies to state public health agencies before they're forwarded to the CDC, which ends up with "stale" data.

"In health care, there has not been a coordinated effort of this size to gather real-time clinical events ... to get a real-time snapshot of health care in the U.S.," Brown said.