National Movement to a New Blood Culture Contamination Benchmark of 1%: Are You Ready?

BONUS SPONSORED WEBINAR!

August 25, 2021

Hospital leaders need to be aware of the national movement toward a new blood culture contamination benchmark of 1%. Typical interventions to reduce blood culture contamination, such as ongoing training and education on best practices, cannot address the skin and skin plug contamination and have shown only modest and unsustainable reductions in contamination rates. Thirty-five to 50% of positive blood culture results indicating sepsis are false positives that resulted from touchpoint contamination and/or skin and skin plug contamination at the time of collection. These false-positive sepsis results confound clinical decisions regarding antibiotic therapy, including selection and de-escalation of broad-spectrum antibiotic treatment.

For the average-sized hospital, this means: 300 or more patients may be adversely impacted by false-positive blood cultures every year in the emergency department (ED) alone; these patients are often treated with unnecessary antibiotics with attendant risks of secondary infection such as C. difficile, multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), and other antibiotic-associated complications; unnecessary laboratory workflow burden; and an estimated $1 million or more in avoidable costs.

The key purpose of this webinar is to demonstrate the profound impact that blood culture contamination has on patient safety, outcomes, and hospital costs and to present an evidence-based technology solution and best practices to provide immediate and sustained improvements at webinar attendees’ hospitals. Clinical evidence from three hospitals will address the challenges with training and education, manual ‘waste tube’ diversion, the importance of a peripheral IV start blood culture draws for patients and nurses, and how they achieved zero or near-zero sustained blood culture contamination rates and zero false-positive CLABSIs.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss the national movement towards a new blood culture contamination benchmark of less than 1.0% and when your hospital will be impacted
• Describe the downstream patient, lab and economic impact of false-positive blood cultures with a focus on driving diagnostic and antibiotic stewardship to mitigate antibiotic resistance
• Review traditional intervention methods to reduce blood culture contamination and their limited effectiveness
• Describe best practices and an evidence-based Initial Specimen Diversion Device (ISDD) that can deliver sustained blood culture contamination rates of less than 1.0% in the ED and hospital-wide
• Discuss recent clinical studies that have demonstrated how hospitals achieved and sustained blood culture contamination rates as low as 0.0% utilizing the ISDD solution.