Clinicians at Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC), the largest health care system in West Virginia and a member of IHI’s IMPACT network, are experts at infection control. As participants in the Center's for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP), as well as IHI’s 100,000 Lives Campaign which calls for reducing surgical site infections, CAMC has proven that judicious administration of antibiotics to surgical patients pays off in three ways.
First, says Dale Wood, Vice President for System Improvement and Chief Quality Officer, appropriate antibiotic use for surgical patients helps reduce the rate of infection. At CAMC, for example, fewer infections after joint surgery have contributed to one of the lowest readmission rates in the SCIP project.
Second, by limiting post-surgical antibiotics to the minimum effective dose — discontinuing 24 hours after surgery instead of 48 — CAMC is reducing the opportunity for antibiotic resistance, while maintaining top-decile infection control.
And third, says Wood, “Decreasing the number of postoperative antibiotics doses from a baseline of 7.9 to 2.4 has resulted in significant savings, both from the reduced doses and the reduced amount of time required of nurses.” Specifically, says Wood, over a three-year period, “Spreading improvements to non-CMS surgical cases resulted in a $3 million savings for drug and supply costs.”
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01/23/2006
