The Wall Street Journal‘s Katherine Hobson writes about the recent JAMA study which she says demonstrates that publicly reported infection control measures, including checklists, “don’t actually correlate with post-op infection rates.”

The study was designed to evaluate the six infection control measures tracked by the Surgical Care Improvement Project. Those measures include everything from antibiotics to hair removal and blood glucose levels.

None of those measures correlated with infection rates individually, Hobson writes, but when taken in aggregate things start to look a little better.

Study lead author Jonah Stulberg, a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (where the research was conducted) tells the Health Blog that the score is called an “all-or-none” composite, which is like a pass/fail: The hospital gets credit for a particular patient only if all the appropriate measures are taken.

With the statistics out of the way, Hobson addresses the biggest question: Why aren’t these prevention measures making a difference in the real world? The answer, as it always seems to be in these situations, is that life is complicated and human beings aren’t robots.

… there’s a big difference between a practice being proven to be effective in a clinical trial and then developing a measure that tries to estimate how often it’s done and then report it publicly.” Real life is messier, and factors such as surgical skill and hand-washing practices are tougher to measure.

Dale Bratzler, CEO of the Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality, tells the Health Blog the results don’t surprise him. Individual process of care measures for things such as heart attack and pneumonia also haven’t been shown to correlate with outcomes, he says.