Safety First
CareFusion Chairman and CEO David Schlotterbeck says a focus on eliminating medication errors and hospital-acquired infections helps caregivers and patients — and customers’ bottom lines.
Ramona Rosales
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E-mailWhat appeared to be a successful surgery could have ended in tragedy. According to medical technology company CareFusion Corp. (CFN), a 30-year-old patient was recently recovering from orthopedic surgery at a Maryland hospital that uses one of the company’s specially programmed Alaris infusion pumps, which releases a small dose of pain medication at the press of a button. The company says that although the pump had been programmed correctly, the patient’s unexpected hypersensitivity to the medication slowed down his breathing. Fortunately, the company says, the Alaris pump was continuously monitoring his respiration, and upon registering the problem, it immediately stopped administering the medication and alerted the nurses, who made the necessary adjustments. The company contends that were it not for Alaris technology, the patient’s condition could have worsened considerably, perhaps fatally.
CareFusion says there are many similar examples of how its products can help save lives. Seated at a round conference table outside his office at CareFusion’s San Diego headquarters, Chairman and CEO David L. Schlotterbeck, using hand gestures to punctuate his points, speaks about what he believes is the positive impact his company can have on the quality — and cost — of health care. His theme? Safety.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that medication errors, which can include administering the wrong dosage of a drug or an incorrect medicine altogether, cause a minimum of one death per day and the injury of around 1.3 million people each year in the U.S. Additionally, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health-care-associated infections, or HAIs — infections caused during the course of medical procedures — affect 1.7 million patients a year and result in 271 deaths a day in American hospitals. Schlotterbeck says he and CareFusion’s other 15,000 employees worldwide are focused on developing and deploying products and services that can help reduce or eliminate HAIs and medication errors.
“Patient safety issues almost always happen because of human error, whether that’s hospital-acquired infections because practitioners don’t wash their hands or overdosing someone on a drug because someone pushed in the wrong number on an infusion pump,” states Schlotterbeck. “A lot is preventable if caregivers are paying attention.”
But Schlotterbeck, 62, is quick to point out that doctors and nurses are often harried in their efforts to provide quality care to their patients, making it a real challenge to devote the attention to detail that’s necessary to eliminate medication errors and HAIs. Which is why, he contends, CareFusion’s products and services have been purchased and used in hospitals in more than 120 countries. The company reports that it is now the fifth largest medical technology company in the world, with $3.6 billion in revenues last year. As the CEO explains, CareFusion’s products and services — which include the Alaris infusion devices; Pyxis technologies for automated medication dispensing; and MedMined services, a patented data-mining algorithm that protects against HAIs — not only provide customers with data but also transform that information into “actionable intelligence,” which helps prevent errors and improves patient care.
Proven Results
As important as it is to develop products that provide this kind of actionable intelligence, Carol Zilm, president of Infusion and Respiratory Systems at CareFusion, says it’s equally important to validate that these devices do what they claim — which, she adds, is why CareFusion is helping to fund clinical studies. “I can say we have the best technology in the world, but why would a nurse or a CIO believe us?” she says. “We need proof so we can say it does reduce certain HAIs by X percent, it does reduce the length of a hospital stay by two days, it does facilitate healing.” In early January, Zilm says, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published just that kind of clinical study. In it, the data demonstrate that CareFusion’s preoperative skin preparation product, ChloraPrep, reduced certain surgical site infections by 41 percent when compared with the most commonly used preoperative skin preparation solution, povidone-iodine. According to CareFusion, surgical site infections are one of the most common HAIs, with 300,000 to 500,000 Americans developing them each year.
Validation also comes from CareFusion customers. Jim Donnelly, chief nursing officer at the 350-bed Hamot Hospital, a Level II trauma center in Erie, Pa., says that his facility has used a number of CareFusion products, including infusion pumps and MedMined. “These systems have been instrumental in improving the safety of our medication infusions, reducing our rates of hospital-acquired infections and improving our treatment of all infections through the optimized use of antibiotics,” he says.
