The Relationship Between Hospital-Specific Hip Arthroplasty Surgical Site Infection Rate and the Overall Hospital Infection Rate

Surgical site infections (SSIs) following hip arthroplasty are a rare but devastating complication. The New York State Health Data website was analyzed for all health care acquired infections from 2008 to 2013 in all New York hospitals. Data points were SSI rates and standardized infection ratio (SIR) for each hospital-year. Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated for each SSI rate comparison. As coronary artery bypass graft and hysterectomy SSI data was not available for many hospital-years, primary comparisons to hip SSI rate were between colon SSI rate and SIR. No correlation was found between hip and other SSI rate trends and SIR, which shows that hospital environment may not be as important to SSI prevention as department- and surgeon-specific measures.