According to a research report from the Orem, Utah-based KLAS, approximately 30 percent of healthcare providers with an infection control system say even though they couldn't live without it, there are tradeoffs. The findings were released in a KLAS report, Infection Control 2012: Breaking the Barriers and Getting Value, also found that70 percent of those without a solution haven't been able to justify the expense.
The report’s authors found that most infection control practitioners, IT directors, and clinical directors use their systems for the burden of increasingly complex, mandatory government reporting. Only a few use it to actively monitor hospital acquired infection rates.
However, according to report author Coray Tate, government incentives and value-based purchasing may change system usage dramatically. "In an age of analytics, most infection preventionists are still mired in mandatory reporting. But so many requirements are coming down the pike that infection control solutions might go from being nice to have to being a must-have,” he said in a statement.
Currently, infection control is still a best-of-breed market, with enterprise vendors Cerner and Epic still in development for their solutions, the report says. All vendors were reported to have gaps, but small-hospital leader CareFusion led in product training and ease of use. Large-hospital leader Hospira led in good interfacing and mandated reporting. KLAS also reported on performance from vendors Premier, Sentri7 (Wolters Kluwer), Vecna, and VigiLanz.
"Although a system is a hundred times better than paper, all infection control vendors have room to improve their products and bring better value-which will help providers justify buying a system," Tate said.
