Beyond the abacus: Leveraging the electronic medical record for central line day surveillance

Manual counting is considered the gold standard for device day recording by the National Health Safety Network. We describe the development of a process for an electronic count of central line days across our ten-hospital health care system. Our validation process identified discordance between the electronic count and the manual count for 71% of patient care units. Adjudication of the count differences by chart review identified the electronic count to be correct 97% of the time.