Characterizing infections and hospital exposures in California using surveillance and administrative data, 2014-2015.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate a method to identify hospitals contributing to Clostridioides difficile infections (CDI) at subsequent hospitalizations.

DESIGN

Retrospective cohort study.

METHODS

We merged 2014-2015 National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) inpatient CDI laboratory-identified events with hospital patient discharge data. For patients with incident community-onset CDI (CO CDI), we identified immediately preceding admissions (within 12 weeks) unrelated to CDI at different (exposure) hospitals. We calculated an exposure rate, and we selected hospitals with the highest (90th-100th percentile) rates by hospital type and compared these rates with reported standardized infection ratios (SIR) for CDI.

RESULTS

We successfully matched 44,691 of 58,842 NHSN CDI records (76.0%) with a hospital discharge record. Among 36,215 unique matched records, 5,234 (14.5%) had an admission not related to CDI within 12 weeks prior to an incident CO CDI event, and 1,574 of these admissions (30.1%) occurred in a different hospital. For 33 hospitals with an exposure ranking within the 90th-100th percentile, CDI SIRs for 22 (66.7%) were not significantly different; 3 (9.1%) were lower; and 8 (24.2%) were higher than the national baseline. Also, 12 (36.4%) had an SIR ≤1.0.

CONCLUSIONS

The identification of high-ranked exposure hospitals presents an alternative to SIR for measuring the contribution of hospitals to the CDI burden across the continuum of care. Further exploration of the potential factors leading to high exposure rank, such as antibiotic use and infection control practices, is indicated and may inform CDI prevention outreach to healthcare facilities and provider networks in California and elsewhere.