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Abstract

Surgical site infections (SSI) are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in postoperative patients, occurring in approximately 1-3% of all inpatient surgical procedures and costing an additional $3.3 billion dollars annually in the United States (Alkaaki et al., 2019; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020). Many interventions and tools have been developed and validated to reduce SSI burden. This quality improvement (QI) project aims to implement a validated SSI risk calculator from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP) as a screening tool to identify high-risk patients on a colorectal/abdominal inpatient surgical service (American College of Surgeons [ACS], 2023). Surgical inpatients identified by the calculator as ?Above Average? risk of developing SSI were alerted to the provider management team upon admission from surgery, giving providers the chance to make management decisions and implement infection prevention interventions as they see fit according to the patient?s high-risk status. Patients from the intervention period were chart reviewed at 30 days post-procedure for development of SSI. Following the intervention, there was a 38.74% reduction in SSI rate in the colorectal patient population from the 2022 average SSI rate for this patient population, however this difference was not statistically significant upon analysis. Additionally, the ACS-NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator accurately predicted the patients who developed SSI to a ?fair? degree. The results of this intervention can be expanded upon in future projects, for use in other surgical services and developed as part of a standard admission screening protocol.

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