Cardinal releases new benchmarking tool to track infection rates

Cardinal Health has introduced a benchmarking tool from MedMined services that allows hospitals to compare risk-adjusted infection rates in each unit of a hospital to peer units in similar hospitals to help identify best practices and areas for improvement.

The MedMined benchmarking tool graphs the incidence of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) in all hospital units to visually present the current infection rate compared to its peers, according to the Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal.

The company said that the tool also indicates whether the infection rate in each unit is improving or not, making it easy for hospitals to identify areas of success and opportunities for improvement. In addition to monitoring and comparing each unit separately, all units may be combined to compare the entire hospital to its peer group.

Cardinal said that infection rates are determined hospital-wide using the MedMined nosocomial infection marker, an objective, electronic measure of the incidence of HAIs.

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