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What is the CAUTI Prevention Analytic Accelerator?

The CAUTI Prevention Analytic Accelerator supports a disciplined, data-driven approach to efforts to reduce CAUTI rates and thereby improve morbidity, hospital length of stay, and costs. Typical implementations focus on catheter utilization, adherence to best-practice care bundles for catheter insertion and maintenance, and urine culture management—areas where getting it right is especially meaningful.

Organizations choose to focus on CAUTI prevention for these reasons:

  • CAUTI is common. Approximately 450,000 to 560,000 CAUTIs occur annually, making it the most common device‑related healthcare‑associated infection (HAI).
  • CAUTI has a high cumulative morbidity burden. CAUTI can lead to catheter obstruction, renal and bladder stone formation, fistula formation, and urosepsis. About 13,000 deaths are attributed to CAUTI annually.
  • Costs and potential penalties can be substantial. Per patient, CAUTI costs approximately $1,000, and catheter‑related bacteremia can substantially increase this cost. Additionally, this hospital-acquired complication may impact CMS reimbursement and value-based care performance.

CAUTI Prevention Benefits and Features

Access an at-a-glance, near real-time view of clinical outcomes and the care practices that drive them.

The Performance dashboard visualizes outcome metrics (CAUTI rate, urinary catheter utilization, excess cost, etc.) in relation to adherence to catheter insertion and maintenance bundles.

Rapidly identify, analyze, and improve.

The Urinary Catheter Risk dashboard enables you to identify the hospital care location where patients are at increased risk of developing CAUTI based on device utilization and bundle compliance. You can also drill down to the facility, unit, service, or patient level to analyze performance further, provide feedback, and support measurement of performance improvement interventions.

CAUTI Prevention Use Cases

  • An executive is concerned: her healthcare system has incurred CMS penalties for each of the previous three years, and their high CAUTI rate is a key driver. The system has already begun improvement work—they implemented standard catheter insertion and maintenance bundles—but now the executive has asked an Inpatient Nurse Manager to do more. The manager uses the CAUTI analytic accelerator to gauge the effectiveness of the provider education on the new bundles and to determine staff compliance with all metrics in the bundle. She is also able to see which bundle elements staff are most/least likely to comply with, and in which departments compliance is best and worst. These insights help her devise a plan for further targeted interventions for improvement.
  • An Infection Preventionist uses the CAUTI accelerator every day to review data on patients with indwelling urinary catheters and their number of days of catheterization, number of days since surgery (if applicable), medical service, unit, absolute neutrophil value (ANC) on that day, indication for catheter, and bundle compliance on each of the previous three days (maintenance and insertion). This helps her identify patients at higher risk for CAUTI and work with the unit nurses to remove catheters when no longer indicated and improve compliance with bundle elements.