HCA Healthcare Magazine - Winter 2019 - 8

Moving
Healthcare
Forward

"As a nurse,
I understand sepsis.
But as a patient,
I didn't fully
realize how dire
the situation
had become,"
says
Sabrina Burkdoll,
RN, Menorah
Medical Center,
Overland Park, Kan.

Why Big Data Makes a Big Difference
The national clinical data warehouse is the heart of our
"data ecosystem," containing electronic health records
(EHRs) of approximately 31 million annual patient
encounters. "The great thing about [our] scale is the ability
to answer big questions with big data-questions that
couldn't be answered otherwise," says Jonathan B. Perlin,
MD, HCA Healthcare's president, clinical services, and
chief medical officer. "We use the knowledge we capture for
continuous improvement and innovation, not only to fuel
our own quality improvement efforts but also to solve vexing
societal challenges such as infection prevention."
Preventing Deadly Infections
Named for Active Bathing to Eliminate Infection,
a recent study known as the ABATE Infection Trial
resulted in a new approach for all of our hospitals.
Like REDUCE MRSA (see sidebar on previous page),
the ABATE trial looked at how to decolonize dangerous
microbes, but this time in a non-ICU setting.
Specifically, the ABATE trial examined whether daily
bathing with an antiseptic soap (chlorhexidine) and, for
MRSA patients, using a nasal antibiotic (mupirocin), would
reduce HAI better than the standard soap-and-water baths
do. Though the general non-ICU population didn't really
benefit from the ABATE approach, that wasn't the case for
the 12% who had medical devices such as central lines and
lumbar drains, which provide additional points of entry for
infection and put this group at greater risk.
"We found that by implementing specific antiseptic
protocols, we could prevent serious infections in patients
with medical devices," says Susan Huang, MD, MPH,
a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of
Medicine, which collaborated on the ABATE research. In
fact, those patients using the infection control technique
showed a nearly 40% reduction in antibiotic-resistant
bacteria and a 31% drop in bloodstream infections.
Sniffing Out Sepsis
Last spring, we announced the rollout of our SPOT
technology, an alert system for the early detection of sepsis.
Unfortunately, many of the signs of sepsis are subtle or
mimic those of other conditions, making it difficult for
humans to detect them at their earliest stages.
The SPOT technology draws on information gleaned

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HCA Healthcare Magazine - Winter 2019

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