Use of diagnosis codes and/or wound culture results for surveillance of surgical site infection after mastectomy and breast reconstruction.

We compared surveillance of surgical site infection (SSI) after major breast surgery by using a combination of International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification diagnosis codes and microbiology-based surveillance. The sensitivity of the coding algorithm for identification of SSI was 87.5%, and the sensitivity of wound culture for identification of SSI was 78.1%. Our results suggest that SSI surveillance can be reliably performed using claims data.