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(Jon) Hello and welcome to Take 5 with The Joint Commission.
I'm Jon DePaolis and I'll be your host for this episode.
Today, we're talking about urinary tract infections,
which are the most common type of healthcare associated infection
reported to the National Healthcare Safety Network.
Among UTIs acquired in the hospital, approximately 75% are associated
with the urinary catheter.
I'm joined in this discussion, by Jeanette Snell,
who's a nurse and clinical advisor at Joint Commission Resources.
Jeanette is going to be walking me through how JCR tracers with AMP product
can be used to support the implementation of evidence-based strategies
to prevent catheter-associated UTIs.
Jeanette, thank you for joining me today.
(Jeanette) Thank you for having me.
(Jon) So to start off, why is it important
to have a strategy in place to prevent CAUTIs?
(Jeanette) Well, you know, how can our medicine evolve every day?
It's imperative that our evidence-based measures
are implemented when they're available.
And CAUTI is one such example,
compliance with indications for catheter insertion,
use of aseptic technique, catheter maintenance,
and prompt catheter removal
are all part of the CAUTI bundle, of measures that, when implemented,
really have a positive impact on patient care.
So these best practices not only improve the quality of care related to CAUTIs,
but they can also indirectly and positively impact other areas,
such as antibiotic stewardship and re-admissions.
In fact, The Joint Commission Standard ICEO 20501
speaks to implementing evidence-based standards
to prevent healthcare-acquired infections, as well as measuring
and monitoring the processes, outcomes, and compliance,
using those evidence-based guidelines.
Every improvement takes the organization one step closer to becoming
a highly reliable organization.
(Jon) As you mentioned monitoring, is there a strategy that's, maybe,
top of mind that would be good for monitoring implementation
of CAUTI measures or other initiatives?
(Jeanette) Sure. Specific tracer activity is a great way
to access compliance with the CAUTI bundle.
Imagine, if you will, conducting a brief tracer for patients
with indwelling urinary catheters.
This will provide real-time data
and allow for immediate feedback,
or just-in-time education,
for the healthcare providers involved in that patient's care.
Furthermore, during tracer activity, where noncompliance is identified,
then immediate corrective action can be taken
and data related to the root cause of that noncompliance
can be collected for analysis.
Tracer activity can focus on many aspects
of a patient's care or just one.
Many, many organizations and systems utilize tracers with AMP,
and that stands for Accreditation Manager Plus,
as a tool to monitor concurrent compliance with the CAUTI bundle of measures
as well as other things, like hand hygiene compliance,
and high level disinfection.
One system was very successful as well
using the tool to monitor infection prevention activities
related to COVID patients.
The observation data can be collected using a phone, tablet,
or a desktop computer.
Endless quality improvement in patient's safety initiatives,
as well as, you know, education, accreditation, and regulatory requirements
can also be measured and analyzed using tracers with AMP.
This electronic tool by JCR products
allows organizations to utilize any of the JCR tracer templates
to create custom tracers using question types,
that include compliant/non-compliant responses,
yes/no responses,
multiple choice,
and even open-ended questions or a combination of all of those options.
The JCR templates have over 100 templates
in the hospital program alone.
And that allows an organization to truly make the templates
and the questions customized to their policies, procedures,
and directives.
The tracer questions can be linked
to the standards and elements of performance for Joint Commission,
and in some cases, the conditions of participation for CMS.
This allows the organization to view compliance
with specific requirements.
Healthcare systems can create tracer templates that can be copied
to some or all of the sites in their system
with just a few clicks of the mouse.
And additionally, organizations can download
their requirements for improvement, also known as RFIs,
from Joint Commission's surveys
and monitor compliance for those high-risk areas.
(Jon) Tracers with AMP certainly seems like a very powerful tool.
What else can this product help organizations do?
(Jeanette) Tracers with AMP is a very powerful tool on its own
but combined with Illuminate Analytics,
a business intelligence platform,
the options for data analysis are greatly increased.
The interactive dashboards provide the ability to view an organization
or systems, RFIs,
their tracer observation data,
as well as perform a comparison of their performance
to Joint Commission's frequently scored high-risk elements of performance.
This data can be accessed for one accreditation program
or multiple.
So, for example, if an organization is accredited
under the Hospital Behavioral Health and home care manuals,
the data for most programs can be viewed together
or separately by program.
The ability to drill into one tracer, site, question, or department,
provides a significant number of ways to analyze the data.
Tracers with AMP provides a platform
to collect and analyze the data in a quick and efficient manner,
and saves time so that you can focus on improvements
and taking the next step to becoming a high reliability organization.
(Jon) Jeanette, this was great information.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today
to share with us about it.
(Jeanette) Thank you for having me.
(Jon) And as always, thank you all for listening.
Other episodes of this program
are available on The Joint Commission's website,
found at www.jointcommission.org
This has been Take 5 with The Joint Commission.
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