Emergency Department, Lab, and Antimicrobial Stewardship: Connecting the Dots
Addressing a Clinical Decision Dilemma at the Source

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Learn the downstream impacts of false positive blood cultures in the emergency department, and how to virtually eliminate blood culture contamination and false positive diagnostic results for sepsis.

Thirty-five to 50 percent of positive blood culture results indicating sepsis are actually falsely positive. This is the direct result of contamination of the blood specimen at the time of collection due to touch point contamination and/or skin and skin plug contamination that cannot be eliminated by conventional skin antisepsis. Manual diversion methods to remove contaminants prior to specimen collection have shown only minimal and unsustainable reductions in contamination rates. An average-sized hospital may have more than 300 patients impacted by false positive blood cultures every year in the ED alone, resulting in over $1 million dollars in avoidable costs.

Most of these patients are treated with unnecessary antibiotics with attendant risks of secondary infection due to C. difficile, MDROs and other antibiotic-related complications. Inappropriate antibiotic usage is the principal driver of antimicrobial resistance; a significant and growing global problem.

Hear how a closed-system mechanical initial specimen diversion device has been clinically proven in peer-reviewed published studies to virtually eliminate blood culture contamination and false positive diagnostic results for sepsis in the ED and significantly reduce vancomycin days of therapy.

What You Will Learn:

• The downstream impact of false-positive blood cultures, with a focus on antimicrobial stewardship in this age of antibiotic resistance
• The strengths and weakness of rapid diagnostic in bacteremia diagnosis
• Other intervention methods that have been applied, and their limited impact
•  A solution (Steripath Gen2 Initial Specimen Diversion Device^®) that can address this diagnostic error at the source

Speakers:

Christopher D. Doern, Ph.D.(ABMM)
Associate Professor, Pathology
Associate Professor, Pediatrics
Director of Clinical Microbiology
Virginia Commonwealth University Health System
Medical College of Virginia
Richmond, Va.

Lindsey Nielsen, ASCP(M, MB), PhD
CPEP Fellow
University of Nebraska Medical Center
Omaha, Neb. 

Barb DeBaun, RN, MSN, CIC
Improvement Advisor
Cynosure Health
San Francisco, Calif.

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