Performance of the Australian hospital-acquired complication algorithm for detecting hospital-onset bloodstream infections
Authors:
- Worth, Leon J.
- Curtis, Stephanie J.
- Stuart, Rhonda L.
- Marshall, Caroline
- Johnson, Paul D.R.
- Attwood, Lucy O.
- Lee, Andie S.
- Dickson, Haydee
- Cheng, Allen C.
- Stewardson, Andrew J.
Details:
Infection, Disease & Health, Volume 31, Issue 1, 2026-03-31
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Background The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare developed a list of sixteen potentially preventable Hospital-Acquired Complications (HACs) and an algorithm using International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes to detect them. We evaluated this algorithm's performance for diagnosing hospital-onset bloodstream infections (HO–BSI). Methods Administrative records were extracted for episodes of admitted patient care from July 2016 to June 2017 at five Australian principal referral hospitals. We applied the BSI HAC algorithm to each episode, then randomly selected 50 patients deemed positive and negative for HO–BSI at each site. Reviewers blinded to HAC status applied the reference surveillance definition for HO–BSI. The positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) for the BSI HAC were calculated. We explored changes to the HAC algorithm to improve these metrics. Results Overall, 352 917 episodes were included; median (IQR) age was 54 (33–71) years, 49.6 % were female, and 43.8 % were elective admissions. Of these, 2229 (0.6 %) had a HO–BSI according to the HAC algorithm. Among manually reviewed episodes, the PPV for the HAC algorithm was 0.28 (95 % CI, 0.23–0.34) and the NPV was 1.00 (95 % CI, 0.98–1.00). The codes ‘Sepsis, unspecified’ and ‘bacterial sepsis of newborn, unspecified’ were both common triggers for HO–BSI HACs (accounting for 35.8 % and 18.4 % of HO-BSIs, respectively) and had poor PPV (0.06 and 0.03, respectively). Removal of these codes from the algorithm increased PPV to 0.53 (0.45–0.62). Conclusion The HAC algorithm had sub-optimal PPV for HO–BSI. This performance was improved by removing the ‘unspecified sepsis’ ICD codes.