A SOFTWARE PROGRAM TO CALCULATE GOODMAN AND KRUSKALS GAMMA - A METHODTO MONITOR SURGICAL-SITE INFECTION-RATES

Several studies have described a need for a valid statistical methodol ogy to facilitate interhospital and intrahospital infection rates for their operative procedures. Physician awareness of postoperative surgi cal-site infection rates has been demonstrated as an effective means t o reduce infection rates in both high- and low-risk surgical patients. This article presents a new software program that allows for simple d ata entry and provides results including the gamma statistic, sample s ize, variance, standard error, and Z value and P value of the gamma re sult. This software also provides a data interpretation table, allowin g infectious disease department physicians or staff to determine if a significant relation exists between operative procedure infection rate s and patient risk factors (Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 1998;19:889- 871).