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Goal is to create consumer-friendly Web site to help patients pick facility
By Tracy Wheeler
Beacon Journal medical writer
Published on Saturday, May 10, 2008
For one in every 10 to 20 patients, a stay in the hospital results in some kind of infection, whether through surgery, IVs, catheters or ventilators.
An estimated 90,000 of these patients nationwide die of these hospital-acquired infections each year.
But here in Ohio, if patients want to choose a hospital based on how well it controls infections, they can't.
Not yet, anyway. Efforts to change that took a big step forward Friday in Columbus, though, as the Ohio Department of Health's Hospital Measures Advisory Council voted to gather new infection information from individual hospitals.
The advisory council approved hospital-specific reporting of:
• Surgical site infections after prosthetic knee replacement, Caesarean section, and coronary artery bypass graft.
• Clostridium difficile, known as ''C. diff,'' infections acquired during hospital stays. (C. diff causes severe diarrhea. In Ohio, C. diff-related
deaths have increased by nearly 325 percent — from 112 in 2000 to 473 in 2005.)
• Blood infections caused by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) or MSSA (methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus) during hospital stays.
• The number of health-care workers vaccinated against influenza.
• Whether the hospital has a program to improve hand washing among the staff.
• And the number of infection-control professionals and infectious-disease doctors.
The reporting requirements approved Friday are part of a larger program that will include about 60 other measures, such as mortality rates after heart attack treatment, pneumonia rates, proper antibiotic use, and bypass surgery volume, among others. The reporting initiative was set by state legislation passed in 2006, with the goal to create a consumer-friendly Web site that will help patients choose the hospital they want, said Jodi Govern, who works in ODH's division of quality assurance.
The council's recommendations aren't final, though. The group will hand over its report to Dr. Alvin Jackson, director of the state health department, in August. Six months of public hearings will follow. Then the rule will need to be written, said ODH spokesman Kristopher Weiss. The new reporting rules should be in place by October 2009, though they likely won't be posted until January 2010.
In the meantime, ODH offers limited hospital performance data in eight categories at http://www.odh.ohio.gov/healthStats/hlthserv/hospitaldata/hospperf.aspx. (Or go to the ODH home page at http://www.odh.state.oh.us/ and click on ''Consumer guide to hospital reports,'' then click on ''Hospital Performance Measures.'')
Cheryl Paul, a Springfield Township nurse certified in infection control, served on the Infection Control Group that recommended the new measures to the advisory council. She said it was important to choose areas that would give patients important information in picking a hospital.
For example, though ventilators are common causes on hospital-acquired infection, they weren't included because people needing ventilators often find themselves in a hospital for emergency care. However, people undergoing knee replacement or Caesarean section ''have some time to think about where they want to have something like that done,'' said Paul, who teaches infection control at Brown Mackie College in Canton.
And as former head of infection control at Lutheran Hospital in Cleveland, Paul knows these new measures will be somewhat of a burden to hospitals.
''It is going to be expensive and it is going to take a lot of man hours to get this done,'' she said. ''You're weighing benefit and risk. And the benefit to the consumer is clear.''
Tracy Wheeler can be reached at 330-996-3721 or tawheeler@thebeaconjournal.com.
For one in every 10 to 20 patients, a stay in the hospital results in some kind of infection, whether through surgery, IVs, catheters or ventilators.
Get the full article here.
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