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Inside the program: Preventing healthcare-acquired conditions

HCPro's Weekly Update on the ANCC Magnet Recognition Program®*, March 9, 2010

The first step for a team looking to prevent healthcare-acquired conditions (HAC), is to pull baseline data to begin establishing benchmark metrics. Benchmarking the data will establish where your organization already stands and what your rates of HACs and so on are, so that you can map out your progress, which can then be reviewed against where you came from as you progress. In other words, you will need to know how many HACs your facility has now in order to see if your team?s plan to reduce the number of HAC?s is working.

You can also use your benchmark data to track length of stay, cost, and reimbursements. If the organization has access, the past year of data (all patients with HAC) should be reviewed and analyzed. If you cannot review all data, you should at least review a sample of 30% of the population. As a starting point, the team can pull patient information for those patients with ICD-9 codes that represent all the POA conditions.

Consider the following areas when starting the data collection process at your facility:

• Number of cases
• Average length of stay
• Sex
• Age
• Payer mix
• DRG
• Average charges
• Average payment
• Average cost

Source: Preventing Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections: Build an Evidence-Based Program To Improve Patient Outcomes

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