Fixing Reporting to Better Understand the Problem
By Cheri
During Dr. Don Wright’s update on the HHS Action Plan to reduce the rates of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) in the country at APIC 2009, he noted that before the problem can be fixed there were vast gaps in HAI knowledge. Some of the problems he brought up were:
- Patient Tracking: Many patients leave the hospital to reside in long term care or proceed with out patient treatments. If an infection develops as a result of a procedure/medical device that is implanted for these on going therapies, it is never tracked back to the hospital to be included in their HAI rates.
- Measurement: Hospitals report on infections in different ways. Catheter related blood stream infections, for example, can be reported on by the number of infections that occur over the number of days (infections/catheter days) or by the number of infections per catheters inserted (infections/catheters inserted). This makes it difficult to compare rates across hospitals.
- Infrastructure: The way the infrastructure is currently set up, information reported or plugged into one government system, cannot be easily formatted/extrapolated for another report.
There are certainly steps that need to be taken to help reduce rates of HAIs but it sounds like HHS has developed a comprehensive plan, taking into account the current system’s short comings, to find a solution.
Add comment June 10th, 2009
