Improving healthcare-associated infection surveillance at a multi-hospital institution using an existing data repository.

The accurate and timely reporting of healthcare-associated infections is an essential infection control practice. Rates provide benchmarks for detecting trends and can help facilities identify intervention opportunities. Standardizing how hospitals within an organization calculate these rates is critical if the rates are to be compared among hospitals and to national standards. We describe a new web-based tool to improve how infection control practitioners identify and report healthcare-associated infections at BJC HealthCare.