IDN improves scrutiny with less staff using auto surgical infection surveillance
St. Elizabeth Healthcare operates six hospitals throughout Northern Kentucky – St. Elizabeth Edgewood, St. Elizabeth Fort Thomas, St. Elizabeth Florence, St. Elizabeth Covington, St. Elizabeth Grant, and St. Elizabeth Falmouth. It also has significant resources for serving the Greater Cincinnati area including 1,211 licensed beds, more than 6000 employees, 927 physicians with admitting privileges and 31 primary care office locations, and four free-standing imaging centers. St. Elizabeth Healthcare is sponsored by the Diocese of Covington, providing an estimated $71 million in uncompensated care and benefit to the community in 2007.
St. Elizabeth Healthcare, an integrated, world-class health system serving Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati, is the first Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky hospital to achieve Magnet™ status
Challenge:
Surgical site infections contribute significantly to morbidity and mortality and impose tremendous burdens on the healthcare system. Most are diagnosed after discharge. With 24,000 procedures a year, manual surveillance methods were resource intensive and, at times, yielded poor results.
Solution:
- Expand automated infection surveillance technology with SafetySurveillorTM to include surgical event monitoring.
- Surgical histories, procedure details included.
- Special notification alerts (to e-mail and/or electronic work page) of post-procedure events – 30 days for non-implant, 365 for implants – if there is a readmission, an outpatient visit, a new culture order or a positive microbiological culture result.
Result:
- Surgical surveillance by Infection Control Professionals (ICPs)
decreased an average of three hours per day.
- Focus of ICPs shifted to prevention
- 29 percent increase in educational offerings
- Accomplished with fewer recorded work hours
- Additional time for ICPs to develop new strategies to reduce surgical site infections and to implement new screening protocols and other infection control projects.
" I’ve been doing Infection Control since the late 1970s.
SafetySurveillor has made the biggest difference in my practice during that
time. It totally changed the way we do what we do. It let us get back to our
primary focus – prevention. Before SafetySurveillor, so much of our day was
gobbled up by paper, copying things down and transferring it from one list to
another. SafetySurveillor is definitely one of the most important changes we
have made."
Patricia Burns, BSN, R.N. CIC
Infection Control Coordinator
St. Elizabeth Healthcare