Major articleBurden of present-on-admission infections and health care-associated infections, by race and ethnicity
Section snippets
Study setting and patient population
We conducted a retrospective study of patients who were discharged from January 2006-December 2008 from a tertiary referral hospital in upper Manhattan. We extracted data from the Clinical Data Warehouse that integrates information from more than 20 clinical electronic sources; the admission, discharge, and transfer system; and the computerized physician and nursing order entry system. Detailed description of the methods for integration of data have previously been published.9
Case definition
We examined racial
Study population
There were 60,994 patients seen in the adult tertiary care hospital January 2006-December of 2008. After excluding 748 patients lacking neighborhood household income data and 8,345 patients who had transferred from other medical facilities or were previously hospitalized within 7 days, the final analytic sample was 52,006 patients. Of these, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanics, other races, and those with unspecified race comprised 42%, 18%, 25%, 5.9%, and 9.4% of the study
Discussion
In this population of more than 50,000 inpatients, we found that non-Hispanic blacks were at slightly elevated risk of developing BSI throughout the hospital stay compared with non-Hispanic whites. Could this have been influenced by differential treatment of blacks in the hospitals? The data indicate that although non-Hispanic blacks were less likely to receive indwelling devices, this had no bearing on the difference in incidence of infections. This association was partially reduced by
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Conflicts of interest: None to report.