Development and Validation of a Semi-Automated Surveillance Algorithm for Cardiac Device Infections: Insights from the VA CART program.

Procedure-related cardiac electronic implantable device (CIED) infections have high morbidity and mortality, highlighting the urgent need for infection prevention efforts to include electrophysiology procedures. We developed and validated a semi-automated algorithm based on structured electronic health records data to reliably identify CIED infections. A sample of CIED procedures entered into the Veterans' Health Administration Clinical Assessment Reporting and Tracking program from FY 2008-2015 was reviewed for the presence of CIED infection. This sample was then randomly divided into training (2/3) validation sets (1/3). The training set was used to develop a detection algorithm containing structured variables mapped from the clinical pathways of CIED infection. Performance of this algorithm was evaluated using the validation set. 2,107 unique CIED procedures from a cohort of 5,753 underwent manual review; 97 CIED infections (4.6%) were identified. Variables strongly associated with true infections included presence of a microbiology order, billing codes for surgical site infections and post-procedural antibiotic prescriptions. The combined algorithm to detect infection demonstrated high c-statistic (0.95; 95% confidence interval: 0.92-0.98), sensitivity (87.9%) and specificity (90.3%) in the validation data. Structured variables derived from clinical pathways can guide development of a semi-automated detection tool to surveil for CIED infection.