As many as 100 percent of surgical site infections go unreported when patients are readmitted at different hospitals than the ones at which they received surgery, according to an article published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Using a data repository allowing patient tracking between facilities, researchers analyzed diagnosis codes for total hip and total knee arthroplasty patients at California hospitals between 2006 and 2009. They estimated the fraction of SSIs identified at operative hospitals versus nonoperative hospitals.
Depending on the hospital, SSIs were appropriately identified anywhere between none and all of the time. Even at operative hospitals, SSIs went unreported 17 percent of the time.
The study concluded that an inter-hospital SSI surveillance network and comprehensive post-discharge surveillance are needed to improve the accuracy of SSI benchmarking.
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