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Patients Better Protected From Healthcare Infections at HealthEast Care System Due to Cutting Edge Technology

Posted on: Monday, 13 August 2007, 12:20 CDT

Patients at HealthEast Care System of St. Paul, Minn., will be better protected from healthcare associated infections (HAIs), thanks to a cutting edge solution from the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance.

HealthEast has signed an agreement with Premier to use Premier SafetySurveillor™ to protect patients through the alerting and detection of HAIs. HealthEast will utilize SafetySurveillor, which continuously tracks infections via Web-based reporting tools, at its four hospital locations.

"HealthEast Care System is the first healthcare system in the Twin Cities to acquire this automated surveillance technology product that has been proven to help lower the incidence of healthcare associated infections," said Boyd Wilson, system director of Infection Prevention and Control/Performance Improvement at HealthEast. "In doing so, HealthEast is furthering our commitment to our patients and the community to provide the highest quality and safest care that we can possibly provide."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projected this year that one of every 22 patients, or 1.7 million patients, would get an infection while hospitalized. Of these patients, 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure. The cost of treating the infections, which are now linked to more deaths than diabetes or Alzheimer's disease, amounts to tens of billions of dollars, experts say. Research has shown these infections often are preventable if identified and isolated in time.

Currently, many hospitals do targeted manual surveillance of high-risk infection areas due to volumes of clinical data. With SafetySurveillor, hospitals have the ability to alert, detect and facilitate timely intervention to reduce and prevent infections and other patient harmful events.

SafetySurveillor can help hospitals in the battle against HAIs by:

Pinpointing infections clustered in an area of a hospital;

Reducing the time spent on the tedious, manual aggregation and review of data, allowing the infection control professional to focus their energy on education and prevention efforts;

Identifying patients for antibiotic intervention, insuring the patient is being treated with the appropriate antibiotic, enhancing patient care and reducing antibiotic costs;

Automatically alerting staff of potential infections and outbreaks by e-mail and pager in real time;

Providing analytic and reporting tools to support mandatory reporting, benchmarking and performance improvement initiatives.

"Hospitals today are tasked with tracking and reporting all types of infections, including surgical site infections," said Dan Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., vice president and medical director for Premier. "Unlike others tools, SafetySurveillor captures comprehensive clinical data across labs, pharmacies and surgical sites for both infectious and non-infectious conditions, minimizing potential for harm."

Premier SafetySurveillor is integrated into the Premier Performance Suite™, which includes benchmarking, reporting analysis and real-time surveillance of clinical, safety, financial, operational, labor productivity and supply data. The Premier Performance Suite is powered by Perspective™, the largest integrated clinical, financial and operational comparative database in the nation, providing patient-level detail to identify opportunities for improvement in clinical quality and efficiency.

About HealthEast

HealthEast Care System is a community-focused, non-profit health care system that provides a full spectrum of health services with compassionate care and cutting-edge technology. Hospitals include Bethesda Hospital, St. John's Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital and Woodwinds Health Campus. As financial stewards in the community, HealthEast is the largest, locally-owned health care provider in the Twin Cities' East Metro, with 7,000 employees and more than 1,400 physicians on staff. For more information, visit www.healtheast.org.

About Premier, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 47,000 other healthcare sites, Premier is the largest healthcare alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates the nation's largest healthcare purchasing network, the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information and one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in healthcare. Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia, and Washington. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.

Source: Business Wire

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