At Novant Health, we support the nationwide effort to ensure that patients coming into the hospital with specific conditions receive recommended care. These recommendations are based on years of research on interventions that have been proven to improve outcomes for these conditions.

Surgical infection rates are calculated using a standard set of definitions from the National Healthcare Safety Network program (NHSN), using a nationally approved set of rules. The NHSN also collects infection rate data from participating member healthcare organizations and uses this data to develop national benchmarks. The national benchmarks assist in determining what a hospital might achieve with a good surgical infection prevention program.

It is important to understand that many surgeries are rated as low, medium and high risk. The NHSN calculates the benchmark for each surgery into low risk of infection, moderate risk of infection and high risk of infection based on a set of patient characteristics, the length of the surgical procedure and on the type of surgery performed. Hospitals can compare infection rates against the NHSN benchmark rates for identifying where good surgical infection prevention practices exist, as well as identify opportunities to improve. Novant's goal is always to try and achieve rates which are as low as possible.

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