A new whitepaper from GE Healthcare IT highlights the crucial role IT must play in preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which affect 1.7 million inpatients each year and are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.

In addition to that steep mortality rate – 100,000 deaths each year – HAIs cost the U.S. Healthcare system as much as $35B each year, averaging approximately $1,100 per patient admitted.

“The numbers are staggering,” says Brandon Savage, MD, chief medical officer at GE Healthcare IT, and co-author of the report, titled The Cost of Healthcare Associated Infections – Measured in Lives, Reputations and Dollars. “Adding to the tragic tale they tell is the fact that the incidence has only decreased minimally over the past 20 years.”

“The total cost added to the system can’t be ignored,” adds Mark Segal, co-author and vice president of government and industry affairs at GE Healthcare IT. “As the government grapples with controlling healthcare costs, reducing HAIs offers a very real opportunity to reduce operating costs while maximizing reimbursements and avoiding future penalties.”

The good news, according to the report, is that there's been a fundamental shift in thinking about the infections – they're seen now not as "random and inevitable by-products of healthcare," but as identifiable and, with the help of health IT, very preventable occurrences.

Hospitals now "can implement proven interventions to reduce the number of HAIs. … emerging technologies offer hope to make even greater progress and to keep HAI rates low over the long-term," the authors write.

Moreover, changes in payment rules – the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services implementing policies to not pay for additional hospital costs associated with HAIs, forcing hospitals to absorb the entire incremental cost of treating them – coupled with the way more transparent HAI data could spur hospitals to protect their good reputations, mean the motivation is there to implement the technology highlighted in the report.

The report shows several instances where IT is showing promise. For example, Intermountain Healthcare is demonstrating how electronic systems can improve patient safety.



"Evidence-based protocols, which start out as paper-based guidelines, are eventually rolled into a clinical information system and then used as a 'shared baseline' at the patient bedside," it reads. "As such, physicians are expected to base their treatments on these protocols and then to make necessary adjustments to meet the individual needs of each patient. Currently, about 80 percent of care delivery at Intermountain is evidence-based, as opposed to less than 55 percent for the rest of the industry. Utilization of such clinical decision support technology drives unnecessary care and unnecessary variation out of the care delivery process – helping to make Intermountain a top performing organization."

The GE report concludes that using such an electronic system to provide clinicians with evidence-based criteria "holds the promise to make implementing patient safety initiatives even easier and more effective. Because HAIs are prevalent, costly and easily prevented, applying automated clinical decision support to prevent such infections is likely to result in a substantial return on investment."

Read the whole report here.