The increasing use of mobile devices by patients to send images and text messages to surgeons and care teams after surgery presents new opportunities for both clinical and public health practice.  Used wisely, this rapidly evolving application of information technology can produce enormously important benefits for individual patients, ASCs (and hospitals), practitioners, and infection surveillance and prevention. 

For that reason, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through the SHEPheRD program, supported a 2-year project led by principal investigators at the University of Washington (UW) and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).  The primary goal is well summarized in the project’s name: Assessing Surgical Site Infection Surveillance Technologies (ASSIST).