Health. Care. | An Educational Blog

In the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, an omnipresent computer named HAL monitors all activity aboard a spacecraft on a critical mission. The single-mindedness of this artificial intelligence makes HAL helpful and life-saving, but misses the mark on some decisions that require a more human touch. While our year 2023 has not yet brought us interstellar craft equipped with AI, we are living in a time when technology is supporting almost every field, including healthcare. This post will explore how technology is helping us with hand-hygiene compliance, and how, like HAL, there are some clear advantages as well as some disadvantages. (Thankfully, no hand hygiene technology is able to eject non-compliers out the airlock. Yet.)

After you make the case for the healthcare innovation in terms of patient and facility benefits, anticipating possible risks, and demonstrating efficacy, the final step is to put all that data into financial terms. To calculate return on investment, you will need to determine, to the best degree possible, the costs of implementation, the potential costs of not implementing, and make connections to the facility and/or system plan for the future. In today's post, we will guide you to resources to help you accomplish these tasks.

For those of us who live where winters can be cold, we may be finding ourselves wrapping ourselves up more as we go out, bundling up to stay cozy inside, and generally getting ourselves situated to make it through the cold season. We are reacting to our environment, just as bears prepare to hibernate, and birds prepare to migrate. Microorganisms react to their environment as well, with some bacteria having the ability to produce spores in order to survive outside a host. In today's post, we will examine one such bacterial spore, one that causes hundreds of thousands of infections each year and tens of thousands of deaths: Clostridioides difficile.

In our series on Clostridioides difficile, we explored the bacteria that causes this lethal hospital-acquired infection, the resulting infectious disease, and the outlook for treatment and prevention. This Thanksgiving week we are providing a shorter read and offering this one-page infographic that presents the highlights of this series on one shareable page. The cycle of infection as well as the lifecycle of the microorganisms are presented in relation to each other, with the added element of where either of those cycles can be broken, preventing an outbreak.

Assessing the potential risks and benefits is an important step  before proposing a new product or program for your facility. You need to anticipate all the possible things that could go wrong alongside the things you believe will go right. In today's post, we will examine what types of risks to identify and how they might impact your facility.

There are 6 reasons why Clostridioides difficile is such a menace. Each one of these aspects makes C. diff infections, or CDIs, a force to be reckoned with. All six make it one of the greatest threats in hospital infection control.

The first step in making a case for a healthcare innovation is collecting the data that supports it. This data includes evidence the the innovation works, that it is needed at your facility, that it would work at your facility, and that it has definite potential to improve patient outcomes and/or financial outcomes. In today's post, we will look at credible sources for that data, and how to make sure you are getting data free from conflict of interest.

C. diff, or Clostridioides difficile, is a Gram-positive, rod-shaped, anaerobic, endosporic, toxigenic, opportunistic, bacillus. Its scientific description makes it sound like a pretty standard bacteria. But this bacteria "causes almost half a million infections in the United States each year" according to the CDC. November is C. diff Awareness Month so stick with us all month to learn more about this microorganism and the unique attributes that make it so lethal. Today’s post will explore the basic definition of Clostridioides difficile. First, let’s unpack that long list of terms mentioned above.

Every successful organization, from a small grassroots group to a global corporation, has a way for ideas to percolate through the system and find their way to the top decision-makers. Human ingenuity can come from anywhere, including cost-saving ideas (the matchbox), ways to attract new demographics (Flamin' Hot Cheetos), retain current customers (Starbucks), and of course, launch completely new products (PlayStation). From our last post, we know that hospitals and healthcare systems allocate their budgets in advance, with limited protocols for integrating innovations. How can the individual with an idea get that innovation in front of the right people at the right time, and of course, in the right way? In today's post, we'll explore one method to get you there.

This post concludes our series on MRSA in support of MRSA Awareness Month.