PROVIDENCE – The Rhode Island Intensive Care Unit Collaborative, a statewide initiative launched in 2004, has brought “a tremendous benefit” to local hospitals, according to Dr. Mary Cooper, chief quality officer at the Lifespan health care network.
In a report released late yesterday, the collaborative cited a 33.7-percent reduction since last year in the rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections – to 1.73 cases per 1,000 central-line days, from last year’s 2.61 infections per 1,000 days – adding that 10 of the 23 ICUs across the state had zero cases for at least six months.
It reported a 15.2-percent reduction in the rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia – to 3.19 per 1,000 ventilator days, from last year’s 3.76 per 1,000 – and said 11 units had zero cases for at least six months.
The ICU Collaborative was born out of a challenge, issued by U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy in 2004, that asked Rhode Island hospitals to apply best practices to make their patients safer.
It focuses on the state’s sickest patients. With a total of 263 adult ICU beds, Ocean State hospitals care for more than 16,000 such patients each year.
The Rhode Island Quality Institute, itself a collaboration between health care providers, insurers and policymakers, teamed up with the Hospital Association of Rhode Island and Quality Partners of Rhode Island to launch the project, enlisting all the state’s ICUs. They decided to focus first on IV-related infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia, because both are costly, preventable and sometimes deadly.
The group brought in experts from Johns Hopkins University who had devised “bundles” of strategies to address each problem – most of them, simple and inexpensive. For instance, to avert ventilator-associated pneumonia, they were urged to sedate patients properly, keep the head of the bed raised and check each day whether patients were ready to have the breathing tube removed, among other safety measures.
“Research has suggested that ICU complications, such as bloodstream infections, more than triple the risk of death and add an average of $35,000 in cost to an ICU stay,” Laura L. Adams, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute, said in a statement this fall. “With every adult ICU in the state engaged in this effort, Rhode Island is well on its way to becoming the safest place in the nation to receive ICU care.” (READ MORE)
Next on the group’s agenda is a project to address sepsis, a massive infection common in ICUs that can lead to multiple organ failure and is the leading cause of death in non-coronary ICUs.
Additional information about the founding of the Rhode Island ICU Collaborative is available from the Hospital Association of Rhode Island at www.HARI.org. A longer version of this article will appear in the March 24 print and online editions of Providence Business News.
