Development and validation of a standardized blood culture contamination definition and metric dashboard for a large health care system.

OBJECTIVES: Blood culture contamination is a major problem in health care, with significant impacts on both patient safety and cost. Initiatives to reduce blood culture contamination require a reliable, consistent metric to track the success of interventions. The objective of our project was to establish a standardized definition of blood culture contamination suitable for use in a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) national data query, then to validate this definition and query. A secondary objective was to construct a national VHA data dashboard to display the data from this query that could be used in VHA quality improvement projects aimed at reducing blood culture contamination. METHODS: A VHA microbiology expert work group was formed to generate a standardized definition and oversee the validation studies. The standardized definition was used to generate data for calendar year 2021 using a Structured Query Language data query. Twelve VHA hospital microbiology laboratories compared the data from the query against their own locally derived contamination data and recorded those data in a data collection worksheet that all sites used. Data were collated and presented to the work group. RESULTS: More than 50,000 blood culture accessions were in the validation data set, with more than 1,200 contamination events. The overall blood culture contamination rate for the 12 facilities participating was 2.56% with local definitions and data and 2.43% with the standardized definitions and data query. The main differences noted between the 2 data sets were deemed to be issues in local definitions. The query and definition were then converted into a national data dashboard that all VHA facilities can now access. CONCLUSIONS: A standardized definition for blood culture contamination and a national data query were validated for enterprise-wide VHA use. To our knowledge, this represents the first reported standardized, validated, and automated approach for calculating and tracking blood culture contamination. This tool will be key in quality initiatives aimed at reducing contamination events in VHA.

Detection Rate of Colorectal Cancer or Precancer Adenoma by Colonoscopy After 1, 2, or 3 Positive Results via Fecal Immunochemical Testing.

BACKGROUND: Single-vial fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) is an accepted method of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. The available 3-vial FIT data set allows for comparison of colonoscopy results using various screening methods. OBJECTIVE: To determine the optimal number of vials for a strong FIT-screening program by examining whether using only a single vial impacts the use of colonoscopy for CRC screening. METHODS: Patients were given 3-vial FIT collection kits that were processed with a positive hemoglobin cut-off detection level of 100 ng per mL. If FIT results were positive, colonoscopy testing was performed using standard practices. RESULTS: Detection of CRC and precursor adenoma was examined in 932 patients, with a positive colonoscopy sensitivity of 56.2% and 3.0% CRC detection after 3-vial FIT; after single-vial screening, those values were 60.9% and 4.7%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Prescreening patients with FIT testing before colonoscopy allows colonoscopy testing to be targeted to higher-risk patients. Implementing use of only a single vial from the 3-vial FIT screening kit would reduce the colonoscopy reflex rate, colonoscopy complication numbers, facility costs, and patient distress by more than 40%, compared with 3-vial screening.