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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now requires hospitals to publicly report surgical site infections (SSIs) after abdominal hysterectomy and colorectal surgery. For this information to be useful in comparing hospitals, consistency in how SSIs are identified and defined is essential. In a retrospective cohort study of abdominal hysterectomies and colorectal surgeries performed at two academic medical centers from mid-2003 to mid-2005, researchers assessed how well the use of administrative claims data supplements standard SSI surveillance for these surgical procedures.
Standard infection-control surveillance initially identified 14 SSIs after 832 hysterectomies and 62 SSIs after 2782 colorectal surgeries. However, detailed review…