At Mount Sinai Hospital, Choosing Wisely’s guidelines for hospital medicine inspired Harry Cho, MD, FACP, and his colleagues to work on the rates of catheter-associated urinary tract infection in their hospital.
They launched their “Lose the Tube” project, creating an electronic catheter identification tool and instituting a daily multidisciplinary query. “On our patient list, we had a column with a green or red dot, indicating if the patient had a catheter or not,” Dr. Cho said. “From there, we wanted to give the onus to the provider. During multidisciplinary rounds, we queried the doctor – we were not ordering them – ‘Does this patient need the Foley?’ After a while, people started coming into multidisciplinary rounds knowing if their patients had a Foley. It was a culture shift.”
Dr. Harry Cho
The project reduced mean per-person catheter days from 3.3 to 2.9, decreased catheter-associated urinary tract infection rates from 2.85 to 0.32 per 1,000 catheter days, and reduced costs by $32,245. Such results are replicable, Dr. Cho said, adding that the most important factor in this project’s success was the High Value Care committee at Mount Sinai, in New York: a team of 90 faculty members, residents, and students mobilized for undertakings like this.
“That’s the model that you want to build,” Dr. Cho said. “That’s the culture that you need so that whenever projects like this happen, they just move forward.”
Reference
Cho HJ et al. “Lose the Tube”: A Choosing Wisely initiative to reduce catheter-associated urinary tract infections in hospitalist-led inpatient units. Am J Infect Control. 2017 Mar 1;45(3):333-5.