Hospital Could Save $13 Million With Infection Control Program

Austin, TX (PRWEB) March 3, 2005

ICPA announced recently that a client hospital, Kaiser Permanente in Anaheim, CA, has found a way to save million using the company’s AICE software to identify a cost-saving drug and treatment modality. AICE helps infection control and quality improvement professionals monitor, analyze and report healthcare-associated infections (HAI). The software is used to investigate outbreaks, analyze patient risk factors, and benchmark data.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAI) have been estimated to cost .6 billion annually in the U.S., and they cause serious patient morbidity and mortality. Therefore, strong infection control and prevention programs in hospitals and other healthcare institutions can improve patient safety and reduce costs at the same time.

Kaiser Permanente infection control specialists used AICE to collect, organize and analyze data on a growing problem in hospitals all across the U.S. — a drug-resistant bacteria called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This organism is also spreading from person-to-person in households and workplaces – these are called community-acquired infections.

Using the software, they conducted a special study for MRSA surveillance that analyzed the sources of infections. The hospital had a total of 543 MRSA cases in 2004: 428 (78.8%) were community-acquired, 32 (5.9%) were hospital-acquired and 83 (15.3%) occurred in patients transferred from other healthcare agencies.

Because of the increase in community-acquired MRSA, they used the AICE software to perform a special study that monitored MRSA sensitivities to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (T-Sulfa) and clindamycin and analyzed the differences in sensitivity between the community-acquired MRSA and hospital-acquired cases of MRSA.

“As a result of the study, our hospital concluded that the drug of choice for the community-acquired MRSA is T-Sulfa. Our infectious disease physicians were elated and shared these findings immediately with other staff physicians. Using T-Sulfa orally instead of vancomycin intraveneously is much more cost-effective, and it has the added benefit of delaying the emergence of vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE), another deadly drug-resistant bacteria that is spreading in U.S. hospitals,” said Lois S. Akiyama, RN, BSN, PHN, CIC, Infection Control Professional at Kaiser Permanente.

“By treating patients with community-acquired MRSA infections with oral T-Sulfa in 2005, we can avoid admitting at least 428 patients with MRSA to the hospital for intravenous therapy. Not only is the oral antibiotic much less expensive than vancomycin, but by treating these patients as outpatients, our hospital will save ,333,359 in antibiotic and hospitalization expenses. We owe our success to the hospital’s professional Infection Control practitioners and to our infection control software that made our job easier and provided critical information that impacted the quality of patient care and treatment. We are pleased that it helped reduce patient stays in the hospital and their associated costs,” Ms. Akiyama continued.

About ICPA

ICPA, Inc. is dedicated to the development of quality patient safety software that collects and analyzes data with the goal of reducing/preventing hospital-acquired infections, improving employee health, and monitoring the health of the community. They are a far-sighted company, eager to assist and provide healthcare professionals with software tools that use the latest epidemiologic methods to improve patient care and employee health. For more information visit www.icpa.net.

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