Acknowledgements
[Financial support]
This study was supported in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (R01HS024915), Nursing Intensity of Patient Care Needs and Rates of Healthcare-associated Infections (NIC-HAI), and by The Jonas Center for Nursing and Veterans Healthcare.
[Conflict of interest]
All authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.
[Ethical Conduct of Research]
This study was approved by the Columbia University Irving Medical Center Institutional Review Board.

Abstract

Introduction
Given infections in patients with PPM are responsible for adverse outcomes such as an increased rate of mortality, one important reduction strategy of the incidence of SSIs is to identify and predict patients at high risk.