Medicare Associated Infection Paper

Introduction

The mission of Ventura County Medical Center (VCMC) is to provide quality cost effective healthcare. In order to accomplish this mission HealthCare Associated Infections (HAI) must be reduced. Ventura County Medical Center along with hospitals around the nation is required to report their HAI’s to the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) which in turn reports to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) which then reports to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The CDC states that 1 in 25 patients will get a HAI during their stay in the acute care setting of a hospital. “There were an estimated 722,000 Hospital Associated Infections in acute care hospitals in the US in 2011.” (CDC, 2015). Nine percent of patients

The reports that should facilitate data abstraction to guide performance improvement and provider care requirements are incorrect. Documentation compliance enables the development of succinct reports that facilitate the internal needs of VCMC and supports the compliance efforts to reduce HAI’s. Documentation compliance has been monitored pre and post EMR implementation and documentation compliance post EHR has been poor. Clinical information systems like Cerner can support evidence-based nursing and become analysis tools to promote the practice of knowledge-driven nursing. Nursing evidence is embedded into an automated system assessment and documentation process to obtain immediate reports in such areas as: Compliance with core quality and clinical performance metrics, and data reported to infection control which includes how many catheter associated infections and central line associated blood stream infections there were which then facilitates the integration of patient safety measures to decrease these HAI’s.

The ability to provide accurate documentation will promote patient centered care, safe and effective care, quality improvement, and teamwork and collaboration which are four of the six domains for quality and safety in

There are approximately 4.5 HAIs for every 100 hospital admissions; the annual direct costs on the healthcare system were estimated to be $4.5 billion dollars. Among UTIs acquired in the hospital, approximately 75% are associated with a urinary catheter; between 15-25% of hospitalized patients receive urinary catheters during their hospital stay. The most important risk factor for developing a catheter-associated UTI (CAUTI) is prolonged use of the urinary catheter. Central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) result in thousands of deaths each year and billions of dollars in added costs to the U.S. healthcare system, yet these infections are preventable. According to the CDC, CLABSIs cost hospitals thirty to fifty thousand dollars per infection and CAUTIs cost eight to ten thousand per infection. My project will help reduce the cost of CAUTIs and CLABSIs, by training nurses how to properly document the insertion and discontinuation of central lines and urinary catheters thus providing accurate data that can be reported to the appropriate agencies (see Appendix A). Inaccurate data causes the numbers reported to CMS to be skewed resulting in a high numbers of infections reported due to the calculations being inaccurate from improper