The PINC AI Applied Sciences (PAS) team, a division of PINC AI, the technology and services platform of Premier, Inc., and Mölnlycke, a medical solutions company, announced the initiation of a clinical trial to evaluate the value of hospital-wide patient bathing and the impact of specialized protocol training, education and compliance auditing on reducing hospital-acquired infections (HAIs).
This clinical trial will tap a subset of Premier’s integrated and aligned provider network to test interventions. In addition, the trial will rely heavily on PINC AI’s 20 years’ worth of anonymized inpatient, outpatient, clinic and ambulatory data to assess the cost, quality and operational implications of change.
In addition, PINC AI’s clinical surveillance technology, TheraDoc will be used to help identify, document, report and control HAIs.
This multi-center clinical trial will evaluate the rate of house-wide HAIs when introducing the use of a chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) house-wide bathing protocol coupled with a protocol compliance audit program against results from a CHG bath in the ICU only. CHG bathing in high-risk patients and settings has been the evidence-based standard for many years. The trial strives to produce timely evidence and determine whether a broader implementation of the protocol is effective for improved patient outcomes using real-world results.
HAIs have a direct effect on patient outcomes and mortality, costing healthcare systems $9.8 billion dollars each year. HAIs are infections that weren’t present at the time of admission and could have been acquired from other patients, hospital staff or the hospital facility. The risk is higher among patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), with one point prevalence study concluding that about 19.5 percent of patients in the ICU had at least one HAI.
HAIs are also a focus of several quality measure initiatives, including the hospital value-based purchasing and the hospital-acquired conditions (HAC) programs. In addition, the law requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to publicly post hospitals' performance on HAC quality measures. HAIs include, but are not limited to, central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), surgical site infections (SSI), hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP), ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and Clostridium difficile infections (CDI).
