More than you'll ever want to know.....

For those of you interested in public reporting of healthcare associated infections, Pennsylvania has just released its 2009 report on HAIs. You can view it here. Since every HAI in every hospital is reported by mandate, this report represents the closest thing to a registry of HAIs that has ever been produced, and this report represents the first full year of reporting. There are 128 pages of slicing and dicing the data. In the 250 hospitals there were 26,000 HAIs across 11 million patient-days for an overall crude rate of 2.4 HAIs per 1,000 patient days. Surgical site infections accounted for 24%, UTIs accounted for 23%, BSIs accounted for 13%, and pneumonia cases accounted for 11% of the HAIs. Note that PA requires non-device related infections to be reported as well. Rates of infections were highest in academic medical centers and long-term acute care hospitals, as would be expected considering the patient populations served. Of note, MSRA accounted for 8% of all HAIs. Of the CLABSIs reported, 16% were due to Staph. aureus, 16% were due to coag-negative staph, and 14% were due to enterococci. One caveat: there has been no true validation of the surveillance at the hospitals though on-site audits are reported to begin this summer.