Want to know the chances of getting an infection following surgery at an Iowa hospital? The Iowa Healthcare Collaborative last week announced that it has updated its hospital performance information on its website, www.ihconline.org.

Iowa hospitals voluntarily collect and report these data in an effort to improve their outcomes, said Dr. Tom Evans, president and CEO of the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative.

“Health-care improvement and responsible public reporting of performance are the main cornerstones of our work with hospitals,” Evans said. “We have used these data to better inform hospitals of their performance and to facilitate infection reduction in Iowa.”

In four years of collecting data on surgical infections, Iowa hospitals have had mixed results. For example, the data suggest that the trend in infections related to heart surgery (coronary artery bypass grafts) is decreasing. However, the trends in infections for colon, hip and hysterectomy surgeries are increasing. The Collaborative is also working with hospitals to report data on a particularly severe type of infection, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), over the past three years. The data suggest that the three-year trends in MRSA surgical site infections and MRSA bloodstream infections are decreasing. 

Here are some of the infection data for Greater Des Moines hospitals: