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Summary: Healthcare-associated infection (HCAI) following open heart surgery is not only a major cause of mortality and morbidity, but also carries higher costs. There are limited data on the additional costs due to HCAI in non-western countries. To estimate the direct cost of the four most common HCAIs in an Iranian sample, we studied 1191 patients admitted for elective open heart surgery. HCAIs were defined using the National Nosocomial Infections Surveillance criteria (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA). The financial costs of length of stay per day in hospital, paraclinical services, medications, instruments, and operating room were provided by the hospital’s finance department. The contribution of HCAI to excess direct medical costs in patients with HCAI was assessed by multivariable linear regression. In the study population, the mean age was 57.3±11.9 years, 857 (72.0%) were men, and 64 (5.4%) developed HCAI. In total there were 73 infections of which the most common was surgical site infection (49.3%), followed by urinary tract infection (20.5%), bloodstream infection (16.5%), and pneumonia (13.7%). After adjustment for other confounders HCAI remained associated with excess direct medical costs (β=1707.06, SE=90.84; P < 0.001). The medical costs in patients with HCAI were almost twice those in patients without HCAI. More than half of the excess cost was attributable to prolonged hospitalisation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we consider the information content of maximum ranked set sampling procedure with unequal samples (MRSSU) in terms of Tsallis entropy which is a non-additive generalization of Shannon entropy. We obtain several results of Tsallis entropy including bounds, monotonic properties, stochastic orders, and sharp bounds under some assumptions. We also compare the uncertainty and information content of MRSSU with its counterpart in the simple random sampling (SRS) data. Finally, we develop some characterization results in terms of cumulative Tsallis entropy and residual Tsallis entropy of MRSSU and SRS data. • Interest in discrimination measures. • Special attention to Tsallis entropies. • Applications to MRSSU and RSS data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]