CareFusion Corporation (CFN), a global medical products company specializing in patient safety, along with Blue Cross and Blue Shield, recently announced the creation of the Illinois Hospital Quality Initiative (IHQI), in partnership with 23 hospitals. Their goal is to enhance clinical outcomes and trim health care costs by cutting down on health care-associated infections as well as medication errors.
The significance of the company’s move may be gauged from the fact that every year nearly 5% of all patients acquire an infection in a U.S. hospital with total mortality approaching the six figure mark. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), infections of this nature cost hospitals about $35 billion on an annual basis. It further estimates that up to $31.5 billion of systemic costs could be avoided by implementing prevention techniques.
In addition to their partnership in Illinois, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and its client hospitals have teamed up with CareFusion’s MedMined services in six other state-level, hospital-based quality initiatives. These initiatives are located in New Jersey, New York, Texas, California, Pennsylvania and Alabama, and account for more than 150 hospitals. Some of these state-level partnerships have led to a near about 19% drop in health care-associated infections.
Participants noted that the IHQI program is intended to tackle not only the human but also the economic toll of health care-associated infections. CareFusion’s MedMined services are designed to facilitate the transition of hospitals from traditional, targeted surveillance to entire-house, electronic surveillance. Furthermore, MedMined is expected to quickly identify new trends and enable hospitals use a proactive approach to avoid infection.
The MedMined infection monitoring technology therefore monitors the whole hospital and alerts medical practitioners of any emerging trend, so that the hospital can implement improvement programs before infections set in. MedMined utilizes data mining tools akin to those utilized by credit card companies (to detect fraudulent purchases).
Over 300 U.S. hospitals depend on MedMined services to handle infection results, making it a leader in surveillance technology of this kind. Hospitals using MedMined’s data mining technology have reduced infection rates by approximately 13% during the initial year of the program’s usage.
CareFusion is dedicated towards helping hospitals significantly improve the safety and quality of care for patients. It offers product lines in the areas of surgical instruments, respiratory care, IV infusion, medication and supply dispensing and infection prevention. CareFusion expects revenues to grow in the mid single digits in fiscal 2011, compared with 9.3% in fiscal 2010.
