• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Main Line Health Hospitals Select Premier Healthcare Alliance to Better Protect Patients Against Healthcare Associated Infections, Antibiotic Overuse

Posted on: Wednesday, 16 May 2007, 09:00 CDT

Main Line Health of Philadelphia has signed an agreement with the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance to use Premier SafetySurveillor™ to prevent outbreaks of infection and protect patients by continuously tracking healthcare infections and antibiotic use via Web-based reporting tools. SafetySurveillor will help Main Line meet current and potential state requirements for a uniformed surveillance system to comply with healthcare associated infections reporting, including universal screening of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile infections.

Main Line Health, which currently utilizes Premier ClinicalAdvisor™ for quality measurement, benchmarking and regulatory reporting, will deploy the solution at its Lankenau, Bryn Mawr, Paoli and Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation Hospitals.

"Main Line Health's goal is to be the safest health system we can possibly be, and eliminating hospital acquired infections is an important part of that effort," said John J. Lynch, III, president and CEO of Main Line Health. "Preventing and monitoring infections is important to our patients' well being. With this system, our infection prevention experts will have an efficient method to track and manage infections and meet our reporting obligations. This is a case where we expect good information to translate into sustainable improvements in patient care very quickly."

Each year, healthcare associated infections (HAIs) contribute to the illness of nearly 2 million patients and the death of another 100,000. HAIs also account for $4.5 billion in excess healthcare costs. In addition, medication errors and inappropriate medication usage create patient care issues that clinicians and hospital leaders actively seek to resolve. Currently, the majority of hospitals are only able to do targeted manual surveillance of high-risk infection areas due to a lack of resources.

With SafetySurveillor, hospitals have the ability to automate the surveillance of lab data and documentation of findings related to healthcare infections and antibiotic usage. Hospitals can track all types of infections, including MRSA, Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) and Clostridium difficile, across all hospital units or surgical procedures cost-effectively, all the while distinguishing between nosocomial infections and those brought into the hospital by patients.

Over 70 percent of healthcare infections have shown some resistance to antibiotics, which are typically administered to half of hospitalized patients. Experts estimate that up to 50 percent of this hospital antibiotic use is unnecessary.

"One of the main values of automated surveillance is improved antibiotic therapy care, which leads to an improvement in the quality of care that hospitals can offer their patients," said Dan Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., vice president and medical director for Premier. "SafetySurveillor reduces antibiotic overuse and antibiotic costs through the reduction of inappropriate use of these increasingly costly drugs."

Many states currently have legislation under consideration to require hospitals to report infection rates, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is considering ceasing reimbursements for hospital acquired staph and urinary tract infections by 2009. Losing CMS reimbursement payments has major cost of care implications for hospitals, which already incur high treatment costs associated with HAIs.

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 Main Line Health

Main Line Health is a non-profit health system serving portions of Philadelphia and its western suburbs. Founded in 1985, MLH includes Bryn Mawr Hospital, Lankenau Hospital, Paoli Hospital and Riddle Memorial Hospital; Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation Hospital; the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research; Main Line Clinical Laboratories; Main Line HealthCare (a physician network); the Wayne Center, a skilled nursing facility; and Mid County Senior Services. Main Line Health is part of Jefferson Health System (JHS), founded in 1996, whose members also include Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network, Frankford Health System, and Magee Rehab. For more information, visit www.mainlinehealth.org.

About Premier, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 45,000 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. and Washington. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category