Resource Location: https://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/final-reports/ssi/index.html
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
The purpose of this project was to explore opportunities for enhancing the detection and surveillance of inpatient-acquired surgical site infections (SSIs) for four target procedures—herniorrhaphy, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), and hip and knee arthroplasty (including primary total arthroplasty, primary hemiarthroplasty, and revision procedures). Four delivery systems came together in order to provide the most representative results and generalizable tools. Collaborating delivery systems include Denver Health (a safety-net hospital located in Denver, CO), Intermountain Healthcare (a large, nonprofit, integrated delivery system based in Salt Lake City, UT), and the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs Medical Center (a VAMC hospital located in Salt Lake City); representativeness was further extended by including the Vail Valley Medical Center (Vail, CO), a Denver Health partner. A major focus of the project was to test the usefulness of computer algorithms that could alert infection control specialists to patients likely to have surgical site infections on the basis of retrospective analysis of electronic medical records, laboratory test results, and patient demographics.