title: A software program to calculate Goodman and Kruskal's gamma: a method to monitor surgical-site infection rates.
abstract: Several studies have described a need for a valid statistical methodology to facilitate interhospital and intrahospital infection rates for their operative procedures. Physician awareness of postoperative surgical-site infection rates has been demonstrated as an effective means to reduce infection rates in both high- and low-risk surgical patients. This article presents a new software program that allows for simple data entry and provides results including the gamma statistic, sample size, variance, standard error, and Z value and P value of the gamma result. This software also provides a data interpretation table, allowing infectious disease department physicians or staff to determine if a significant relation exists between operative procedure infection rates and patient risk factors.
authors.affiliation: Health Studies Department, Lehigh Valley Hospital, Allentown, PA 18104, USA. Thomas.Wasser@lvh.com
authors.forename: T E
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Wasser
mesh_terms: D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D017053:Infection Control / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012984:Software; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods; D013530:Surgical Wound Infection / Q000517:prevention & control*; D014481:United States