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During the last decade, numerous quality improvement initiatives have been aimed at preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). From 2006 through 2012, the incidence of VAP reported to the CDC fell substantially, from 3.1 to 0.9 per 1000 ventilator days. To many clinicians, these numbers seemed implausibly low. In an effort to confirm this drop in VAP incidence, investigators examined data from a representative sample of 1856 critically ill patients in the Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System from 2005 through 2013. For this project, relevant clinical data were collected directly from medical charts by trained abstractors (and not from administrative data collected for other purposes).
The definition for VAP in this cohort was con…