In January 2003, leadership of the Medicare National Surgical Infection Prevention Project hosted the Surgical Infection Prevention Guideline Writers Workgroup (SIPGWW) meeting. The objectives were ...to review areas of agreement among the most-recently published guidelines for surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis, to address inconsistencies, and to discuss issues not currently addressed. The participants included authors from most of the groups that have published North American guidelines for antimicrobial prophylaxis, as well as authors from several specialty colleges. Nominal group process was used to draft a consensus paper that was widely circulated for comment. The consensus positions of SIPGWW include that infusion of the first antimicrobial dose should begin within 60 min before surgical incision and that prophylactic antimicrobials should be discontinued within 24 h after the end of surgery. This advisory statement provides an overview of other issues related to antimicrobial prophylaxis, including specific suggestions regarding antimicrobial selection.
The human and financial costs of treating surgical site infections (SSIs) are increasing. The number of surgical procedures performed in the United States continues to rise, and surgical patients are ...initially seen with increasingly complex comorbidities. It is estimated that approximately half of SSIs are deemed preventable using evidence-based strategies.
To provide new and updated evidence-based recommendations for the prevention of SSI.
A targeted systematic review of the literature was conducted in MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library from 1998 through April 2014. A modified Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach was used to assess the quality of evidence and the strength of the resulting recommendation and to provide explicit links between them. Of 5759 titles and abstracts screened, 896 underwent full-text review by 2 independent reviewers. After exclusions, 170 studies were extracted into evidence tables, appraised, and synthesized.
Before surgery, patients should shower or bathe (full body) with soap (antimicrobial or nonantimicrobial) or an antiseptic agent on at least the night before the operative day. Antimicrobial prophylaxis should be administered only when indicated based on published clinical practice guidelines and timed such that a bactericidal concentration of the agents is established in the serum and tissues when the incision is made. In cesarean section procedures, antimicrobial prophylaxis should be administered before skin incision. Skin preparation in the operating room should be performed using an alcohol-based agent unless contraindicated. For clean and clean-contaminated procedures, additional prophylactic antimicrobial agent doses should not be administered after the surgical incision is closed in the operating room, even in the presence of a drain. Topical antimicrobial agents should not be applied to the surgical incision. During surgery, glycemic control should be implemented using blood glucose target levels less than 200 mg/dL, and normothermia should be maintained in all patients. Increased fraction of inspired oxygen should be administered during surgery and after extubation in the immediate postoperative period for patients with normal pulmonary function undergoing general anesthesia with endotracheal intubation. Transfusion of blood products should not be withheld from surgical patients as a means to prevent SSI.
This guideline is intended to provide new and updated evidence-based recommendations for the prevention of SSI and should be incorporated into comprehensive surgical quality improvement programs to improve patient safety.
Among the most common complications that occur after surgery are surgical site infections and postoperative sepsis, cardiovascular complications, respiratory complications (including postoperative ...pneumonia), and thromboembolic complications. Patients who experience postoperative complications have dramatically increased hospital length of stay, hospital costs, and mortality rates. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has implemented the Surgical Infection Prevention Project to decrease the morbidity and mortality associated with postoperative surgical site infections. More recently, the Surgical Care Improvement Project, a national quality partnership of organizations committed to improving the safety of surgical care, has been announced. This review will provide an update from the Surgical Infection Prevention Project and provide an introduction to the Surgical Care Improvement Project.
We aimed to measure the association between 2013 guideline concordant prophylactic antibiotic use prior to surgery and infection with Clostridium difficile.
We conducted a retrospective case-control ...study by selecting patients who underwent a surgical procedure between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2013.
Large urban community hospital.
Cases and controls were patients age 18+ years who underwent an eligible surgery (i.e., colorectal, neurosurgery, vascular/cardiac/thoracic, hysterectomy, abdominal/pelvic and orthopedic surgical procedures) within six months prior to infection diagnosis. Cases were diagnosed with C. difficile infection while controls were not.
The primary exposure was receiving (vs. not receiving) the recommended prophylactic antibiotic regimen, based on type and duration. Potential confounders included age, sex, length of hospital stay, comorbidities, type of surgery, and prior antibiotic use. Crude and adjusted odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated using logistic regression.
We enrolled 68 cases and 220 controls. The adjusted OR among surgical patients between developing C. difficile infection and not receiving the recommended prophylactic antibiotic regimen (usually receiving antimicrobial prophylaxis for more than 24 hours) was 6.7 (95% CI: 2.9-15.5). Independent risk factors for developing C. difficile infection included having severe comorbidities, receiving antibiotics within the previous 6 months, and undergoing orthopedic surgery.
Adherence to the recommended prophylactic antibiotics among surgical patients likely reduces the probability of being case of C. difficile. Antibiotic stewardship should be a priority in strategies to decrease the morbidity, mortality, and costs associated with C. difficile infection.
In January 2003, leadership of the Medicare National Surgical Infection Prevention Project hosted the Surgical Infection Prevention Guideline Writers Workgroup meeting. The objectives were to review ...areas of agreement among the published guidelines for surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis, to address inconsistencies, and to discuss issues not currently addressed. The participants included authors from most of the published North American guidelines for antimicrobial prophylaxis and several specialty colleges. The workgroup reviewed currently published guidelines for antimicrobial prophylaxis. Nominal group process was used to draft a consensus paper that was widely circulated for comment. The consensus positions of the workgroup include that infusion of the first antimicrobial dose should begin within 60 minutes before surgical incision and that prophylactic antimicrobial agents should be discontinued within 24 hours of the end of surgery. This advisory statement provides an overview of other issues related to antimicrobial prophylaxis including specific suggestions regarding antimicrobial selection.
Public reporting and pay for performance are intended to accelerate improvements in hospital care, yet little is known about the benefits of these methods of providing incentives for improving care.
...We measured changes in adherence to 10 individual and 4 composite measures of quality over a period of 2 years at 613 hospitals that voluntarily reported information about the quality of care through a national public-reporting initiative, including 207 facilities that simultaneously participated in a pay-for-performance demonstration project funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; we then compared the pay-for-performance hospitals with the 406 hospitals with public reporting only (control hospitals). We used multivariable modeling to estimate the improvement attributable to financial incentives after adjusting for baseline performance and other hospital characteristics.
As compared with the control group, pay-for-performance hospitals showed greater improvement in all composite measures of quality, including measures of care for heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and pneumonia and a composite of 10 measures. Baseline performance was inversely associated with improvement; in pay-for-performance hospitals, the improvement in the composite of all 10 measures was 16.1% for hospitals in the lowest quintile of baseline performance and 1.9% for those in the highest quintile (P<0.001). After adjustments were made for differences in baseline performance and other hospital characteristics, pay for performance was associated with improvements ranging from 2.6 to 4.1% over the 2-year period.
Hospitals engaged in both public reporting and pay for performance achieved modestly greater improvements in quality than did hospitals engaged only in public reporting. Additional research is required to determine whether different incentives would stimulate more improvement and whether the benefits of these programs outweigh their costs.
Registry studies have suggested improvements in door-to-balloon times, but a national assessment of the trends in door-to-balloon times is lacking. Moreover, we do not know whether improvements in ...door-to-balloon times were shared equally among patient and hospital groups.
This analysis includes all patients reported by hospitals to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for inclusion in the time to percutaneous coronary intervention (acute myocardial infarction-8) inpatient measure from January 1, 2005, through September 30, 2010. For each calendar year, we summarized the characteristics of patients reported for the measure, including the number and percentage in each group, the median time to primary percutaneous coronary intervention, and the percentage with time to primary percutaneous coronary intervention within 75 minutes and within 90 minutes. Door-to-balloon time declined from a median of 96 minutes in the year ending December 31, 2005, to a median of 64 minutes in the 3 quarters ending September 30, 2010. There were corresponding increases in the percentage of patients who had times <90 minutes (44.2% to 91.4%) and <75 minutes (27.3% to 70.4%). The declines in median times were greatest among groups that had the highest median times during the first period: patients >75 years of age (median decline, 38 minutes), women (35 minutes), and blacks (42 minutes).
National progress has been achieved in the timeliness of treatment of patients with ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction who undergo primary percutaneous coronary intervention.
Outcome measures for patients hospitalized with pneumonia may complement process measures in characterizing quality of care. We sought to develop and validate a hierarchical regression model using ...Medicare claims data that produces hospital-level, risk-standardized 30-day mortality rates useful for public reporting for patients hospitalized with pneumonia.
Retrospective study of fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries age 66 years and older with a principal discharge diagnosis of pneumonia. Candidate risk-adjustment variables included patient demographics, administrative diagnosis codes from the index hospitalization, and all inpatient and outpatient encounters from the year before admission. The model derivation cohort included 224,608 pneumonia cases admitted to 4,664 hospitals in 2000, and validation cohorts included cases from each of years 1998-2003. We compared model-derived state-level standardized mortality estimates with medical record-derived state-level standardized mortality estimates using data from the Medicare National Pneumonia Project on 50,858 patients hospitalized from 1998-2001. The final model included 31 variables and had an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve of 0.72. In each administrative claims validation cohort, model fit was similar to the derivation cohort. The distribution of standardized mortality rates among hospitals ranged from 13.0% to 23.7%, with 25(th), 50(th), and 75(th) percentiles of 16.5%, 17.4%, and 18.3%, respectively. Comparing model-derived risk-standardized state mortality rates with medical record-derived estimates, the correlation coefficient was 0.86 (Standard Error = 0.032).
An administrative claims-based model for profiling hospitals for pneumonia mortality performs consistently over several years and produces hospital estimates close to those using a medical record model.
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