Three Additional St. Elizabeth Healthcare Hospitals Will Use Premier’s SafetyConnect To Help Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections, Optimize Antimicrobial Use
CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Premier healthcare alliance today announced that three more hospitals from Edgewood, Ky.-based St. Elizabeth Healthcare selected Premier’s SafetyConnect™ patient safety program to further increase patient safety. All six St. Elizabeth hospitals now use SafetyConnect to protect patients more effectively while safely reducing hospital costs.
As part of SafetyConnect, St. Elizabeth Florence, St. Elizabeth Ft. Thomas and St. Elizabeth Falmouth will use SafetySurveillor®, Premier’s automated solution to help prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and optimize antibiotic use. The St. Elizabeth facilities (Covington, Grant and Edgewood) that have used the solution since 2002 have, among their many improvements, decreased surgical surveillance by Infection Control Professionals (ICPs) by an average of three hours per day.
“In the past, much of our day included paper-intensive activities, such as copying and transferring information from one list to another," said Patricia Burns, BSN, R.N. CIC, Infection Control Coordinator at St. Elizabeth Healthcare. “Acquiring SafetySurveillor is one of the more important changes we have made as it allows us to get back to our primary focus of prevention.”
St. Elizabeth hospitals also use Premier’s OperationsAdvisor® solution to better manage labor costs while improving patient quality.
Said Premier's Scott D. Pope, Pharm.D., SafetyConnect national director, “SafetyConnect helps hospitals manage infection control surveillance, prevention and reporting efforts to enhance overall patient safety and eliminate waste.”
More than 270 hospitals rely on SafetyConnect for data analytics and software, performance improvement support services and collaborative knowledge sharing to improve overall patient safety and eliminate hospital waste.
The Infection Control and Pharmacy modules in SafetySurveillor allow pharmacists and infection preventionists to obtain precise alerts and reports on hospital-defined parameters to help improve outcomes, reducing patient length of stay and associated costs.
Additionally, SafetySurveillor helps hospitals meet state-mandated public reporting of certain HAIs, including Clostridium difficile and screening for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), some of the most common and harmful infections found in hospitals today. With the automated SafetySurveillor system, hospitals can detect HAIs, alert staff and facilitate timely intervention to reduce and prevent infections.
Premier is one of the HAI surveillance system software vendors participating in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention project to automate transmission of HAI data from hospitals to the agency's National Healthcare Safety Network.
SafetyConnect provides access to the Premier Performance Improvement Portal™, a library of performance improvement advice and best practices, and a networking community for knowledge sharing and interaction with industry specialists, hospital and health system peers and Premier's knowledge experts.
About St. Elizabeth Healthcare
St. Elizabeth Healthcare features six facilities throughout Northern Kentucky – St. Elizabeth Covington, St. Elizabeth Edgewood, St. Elizabeth Falmouth, St. Elizabeth Florence, St. Elizabeth Fort Thomas, and St. Elizabeth Grant. It also has vast resources to serve the Greater Cincinnati area, including 1,192 licensed beds, more than 6,000 employees, more than 900 physicians with admitting privileges, 34 primary care office locations, and five free-standing imaging centers. St. Elizabeth Healthcare is sponsored by the Diocese of Covington, providing an estimated $68.6 million in uncompensated care and benefit to the community in 2008.
About the Premier healthcare alliance, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 67,000-plus other healthcare sites working together to achieve high quality, cost-effective care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier maintains the nation's most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network. A world leader in helping deliver measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West to improve hospital performance. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has offices in San Diego, Philadelphia and Washington. www.premierinc.com
CONTACT:
Premier Inc.
Alven Weil, 704-733-5797
[email protected]
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