MRSA is a drug-resistant bacteria that is plaguing hospitals, and is on the rise.
Hospitals in Seattle, and I presume in many other cities, don’t routinely screen for MRSA (via the WSJ Health Blog), and a report revealed that the number of patients infected rose to 4,723 cases from 141 over the past decade.
Should patients be routinely screened? At $20 a test, this will significantly balloon health costs at a time when government and insurers are trying to control spending. Another issue is that most hospitals do not have enough private rooms to house every MRSA-carrier.
Malpractice is cited as another reason, as “results would show who already had the germ upon admission “” and who picked it up while in the hospital. Patients could then blame the hospital for their infections.”
That last reason conflicts with Medicare’s proposed “never” event policy that doesn’t pay for hospital-acquired MRSA infections. I would think that more hospitals would want to screen for MRSA, if only to show that some cases are community-acquired, and not be denied payment. So the malpractice excuse doesn’t make sense to me.
The right balance clearly needs to be struck between controlling spiraling health spending, and reducing the incidence of this deadly infection. I’m not sure where that point is.
Creative Commons image license from feastoffools.
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There are some clear steps that every hospital should take, both for the sake of its patients and for the sake of its bottom line, since it will be penalized financially for hospital-acquired infections.
Check out a recent GAO report on what some hospitals and states are doing on this front. http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081002084135.pdf
More people are now dying each year from MRSA then from AIDS. http://tinyurl.com/22uo5c
In New Jersey two Insurance companies are linking it to P4P for Hospitals. (detection not reduction). http://tinyurl.com/6ecvyb They were surprised to discover that once implemented 8.4% of all patients were carriers and 1.4% acquired it in the hospital.
Business Case: There is no evidence that it will ballon health care costs and in fact the programs pay for themselves by preventing even one case which costs up to $20,000 to treat. Already covered by the IHI campaign this might become a “never event” soon.
Sherry Reynolds - Alliance4Health
One area often overlooked in the battle against the transfer of dangerous infectious diseases in medical environments are the ubiquitous keyboards and mice. Standard keyboards and mice can not be disinfected because germs collect around and in seams and under keys. Recently Man & Machine, Inc. released a White Paper titled, “Minimizing Transmission of Infectious Disease in Heath Care Environments by Use of Disinfectable PC Keyboards and Mice.” It can be viewed at: http://www.man-machine.com/whitepaper.htm