More than 50 hospitals in California will be joining the Blue Shield of California Foundation's expanded California Healthcare-Associated Infection Prevention Initiative, an effort to curb the millions of dollars that are spent each year on healthcare-associated infections, or HAIs.
In February the BSCF announced it would commit up to $4 million to fund the project.
Over the next two years the California Healthcare-Associated Infection Prevention Initiative, or CHAIPI, aims to make significant reductions, including reducing the number of patients contracting HAIs by 2,000, reducing the number of patient hospital days by 15,000 and reducing the cost to patients and hospitals by $30 million.
The California hospitals will take part in an advanced learning collaborative staffed by infection prevention leaders from across the nation. Fourteen non-profit hospitals involved in the project will receive grants to help purchase data mining technology that will provide early detection and rapid treatment of healthcare-associated infections.
Participating for-profit hospitals will have the opportunity to purchase data-mining technology at a reduced rate.
The data mining technology will be made available at reduced costs from Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health's MedMined division, which provides hospitals with real-time access to and management of infection-related data.
California currently estimates that 150,000 patients suffer from HAIs annually, 9,000 of which result in death.
"Our goal is to eliminate the human suffering and the additional healthcare costs that result from healthcare-associated infections," said Crystal Hayling, BSCF's president and CEO. "By promoting the use of new technologies and implementing state-of-the-art process improvements, we know we can absolutely reduce infections in patients across California and prevent millions of dollars in unnecessary costs."
In 2005, BSCF sponsored the nine-hospital CHAIPI pilot program to determine if new technologies could help infection-control specialists track and prevent the spread of infection. During the course of the 18-month pilot, more than 600 infections were prevented, resulting in 4,640 fewer patient hospital days. BSCF estimates its initial $1 million investment in the CHAIPI pilot lowered costs of care by more than $9 million.
"Sutter Health is an early adopter of patient safety technologies, and the CHAIPI project provides more new tools and data that we can use to further advance our efforts. The opportunity to collaborate with other organizations across the state increases our ability to implement best practices even sooner and to save more lives," said Krystin Dozier, an RN and vice president of clinical effectiveness for the Sutter Health network, who has seven northern California hospitals participating in the expanded CHAIPI program.
Are you participating in this program? What types of results do you hope to see or have already seen? E-mail Associate Editor Molly Merrill at molly.merrill@medtechpublishing.com.