BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Intermountain and Amplifire partnered to produce clinical knowledge engineering courses targeted at reducing CLABSI and CAUTI incidents. Together with the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, Intermountain co-developed two courses, Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection Prevention and Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection Prevention. Using the latest evidence-based information and best practices, these courses were designed to eliminate Confidently Held Misinformation (CHM), uncertainty, and knowledge gaps that lead to avoidable infection. The courses were deployed to 3,707 nurses and 4,511 nurses respectively through the Amplifire knowledge engineering platform. The result was a 51% reduction in CLABSI and a 36% reduction in CAUTI incidents. The personalized online training took just 26 minutes on average per nurse.
Intermountain and the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance are now partnering to make these clinical knowledge engineering courses available to health systems across the country to help solve this important patient infection risk nationwide.
CAUTI: In the US, about 30 million Foley catheters are inserted each year, leading to nearly 1 million catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs). These infections are the most commonly reported hospital-acquired condition (HAC). Intermountain employed the Amplifire platform to acquire data on what its nurses knew and didn’t know about managing urinary catheters, and to find and fix any misinformation. Following deployment of the Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection Prevention course and seven months of measuring efficacy, CAUTI rates had fallen by 36% compared to the previous 32 months.
CLABSI: Central venous catheters (CVCs) are used for the administration of intravenous fluids, blood products, medications, and nutrition. They also provide access for hemodialysis and other forms of long-term treatment, such as chemotherapy. Widespread and essential, CVCs are also a frequent cause of healthcare-associated bloodstream infections. It is estimated that 250,000 cases of central line–associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) occur in the U.S. every year. According to the CDC, CLABSIs are associated with a mortality rate of 12–25% and each episode costs approximately $22,000 of unreimbursed care to the health system. Following deployment of the Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection Prevention course and seven months of measuring efficacy, CLABSI rates had fallen by 51% compared to the previous 12 months.
According to Tammy Richards, Intermountain’s AVP of Professional Practice and Learning, “Intermountain has an international reputation for excellence in patient safety and quality. Our work with Amplifire helps us continue to improve by focusing our training on critical topics that will demonstrate significant new achievements in patient safety.”
Bob Burgin, CEO at Amplifire noted, “We recognize that learning must lead to behavioral change and that the ultimate measure of effectiveness is found in better patient outcomes and a reduction in unreimbursed care. We have seen larger reductions in adverse events in 2018 then we ever expected, thanks to Intermountain and other healthcare systems deployment of the Amplifire platform to detect and correct confidently held misinformation. With these results, we have developed, in partnership with our member health systems, highly targeted clinical knowledge engineering courses around critical areas of risk, including SSIs, Patient Falls, Sepsis and others.”
About Intermountain
Intermountain Healthcare is a Utah-based not-for-profit system of 23 hospitals, 170 clinics, a Medical Group with close to 2,300 employed physicians and advanced practice clinicians, a health plans group under the name SelectHealth, and other medical services.
About Amplifire
To date, Amplifire has delivered 1.8 billion learner interactions and remediated 194 million instances of confidently held misinformation. Healthcare, education, and Fortune 500 companies use Amplifire’s patented learning algorithms, knowledge analytics, and diagnostic capabilities to save time, money, and lives.
