Hi-Tech Infection Surveillance

Hospitals Turn to Information Technology Solutions from Cardinal Health to Help Reduce Hospital-Acquired Infections

More than 250 hospitals across the country have turned to Cardinal Health to help prevent, detect, monitor and treat hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), a problem that affects one in every 20 patients across the U.S. and costs the health care industry an estimated $20 billion each year.

The MedMined™ Data Mining Surveillance Service monitors the entire hospital for early signs of an emerging issue and targets improvement efforts where and when they can have the most impact. Using technology similar to that used by credit card companies to monitor purchases for fraud, this patented technology automatically identifies patterns indicative of specific and correctable quality breakdowns without predefined search criteria, user-defined control charts or alerts, or chart review.

The new MRSA Scorecard provides a hospital-wide view of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), allowing infection control practitioners to track the types and locations of MRSA infections throughout the hospital. The MRSA Scorecard allows hospitals to identify patients who have tested positive for the bacteria and distinguish between those who likely acquired the infection in the hospital and those who had an MRSA infection present on admission. Through this real-time view, hospitals can rapidly dispatch resources to limit the spread of MRSA infections that are responsible for an estimated 94,000 life-threatening conditions and 18,650 deaths annually in the U.S.

The MedMined™ Antimicrobial Management Service helps alert clinicians of patients that may be in need of therapy optimization early in the course of infection. In addition, detailed patient histories provide infectious disease physicians, clinical pharmacists and infection control practitioners with a more comprehensive view of clinically significant events.

MedMined™ services were developed to help hospitals produce quality of care improvements and measurable cost savings by providing real-time measurement of data related to HAIs, and clinical, evidence-based practice recommendations that enable immediate interventions to prevent infections from spreading. Electronic infection surveillance enables hospitals to significantly reduce the time necessary for manual data collection and analysis, and redeploy their infection control resources to value-added areas that directly impact patient care, such as clinician education and infection prevention initiatives. The service is also designed for start-to-finish implementation in less than 60 days, with only a minimal resource requirement from the hospital’s information technology department.

“MedMined™ services implementation was swift, utilized our hospital’s existing data and required minimum effort by my IT department,” said Linda Reed, RN, MBA, vice president and chief information officer of Atlantic Health in Morristown, N.J.

Hospitals using MedMined™ services realized more than 13 percent reductions of HAIs on average in the first year and have repeatedly produced an average 300 percent internal rate of return within 12 months. Additionally, MedMined™ services recently received the notable ’Peer Reviewed’ designation from the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Cardinal Health will be showcasing this technology at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference and Exhibition, being held Feb. 24-28 in Orlando.

Additional new Cardinal Health innovations to be highlighted at the HIMSS Conference and Exhibition include:

· Web-based, integrated medication order management and clinical intervention tool: A new system that uses a hospital’s existing fax machines on its nursing units to transmit paper medication orders into a digitized format that is viewable in the hospital pharmacy through a web-based document management system. All orders are queued in a central location and prioritized by urgency, which enables faster and safer reviews of patients’ medication orders. The system also provides detailed metrics such as order volume by line, order turnaround times, number of unapproved abbreviations, duplicate orders, medication error rates, and also tracks clinical consultations and interventions according to safety issues and physician practices.

· Transfusion verification for critical care: The only system currently available that can help protect patients from blood transfusion errors hospital-wide, including those in operating rooms, emergency departments and other critical care areas, where transfusions need to occur rapidly. The new Rapid Infusion feature provides a systematic method of positive patient identification for matching blood components and efficient documentation, even during emergency situations.

· Safer medication management: A single medication management solution that can help clinicians monitor orders for their patients, determine the location of medications, pre-populate parameters for continuous IV infusions, verify the accuracy of medications to be administered and document to the hospital’s existing IT systems. The solution links the workflow across automated medication dispensing technology, infusion safety systems and point-of-care barcode medication administration applications.

· Cardinal Health partnership program: By partnering with health care IT vendors, Cardinal Health’s Alaris®, Pyxis® and CareFusion™ technologies can be interfaced with a wide variety of health care IT products to allow hospitals to maximize their current IT investments when installing one or more of Cardinal Health’s patient safety technologies.