Modern infection control practitioners (ICPs) need advanced techniques for detecting outbreaks, surveillance, screening and tracking. Innovative developments offer refined techniques to curtail healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs).
ICPs have more to do than just finding and addressing bad bugs; infection reporting requirements further complicate the ICP’s responsibilities. Not only do they have to detect and stop infections, they must report their results to the local healthcare authorities. In the past, unwieldy paper records made this more difficult, but nowadays, electronic medical records and other sophisticated offerings can make the ICP’s job easier.
Guidelines
In addition to national guidelines, specific hospital systems have begun mandating their own pathogen-specific surveillance, observes Scott A. Walker, vice president of strategic development for TheraDoc. “The VA system has mandated rapid methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) screening cultures and will likely add other multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) to this list over time,” he points out. “Many hospitals have instituted their own screening protocols to reduce the incidence of specific infections within their organizations. In 2004 the Joint Commission put in place an accountability structure — CEOs to ICPs must understand the hospital’s risk profile, create a program to reduce the identified risks, update the profile and plan every six months and know what progress is being made to reduce both the risk and incidence of these infections. CMS and commercial payers are creating non-reimbursement policies for HAI-related expenses.”
