3 Benefits of CDC's New Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia Framework

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the surveillance definitions for patients receiving mechanical ventilation in an effort to improve hospitals' ability to track complications, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Under the new framework, there are four different surveillance targets with different levels of acuity: ventilator-associated condition, infection-related ventilator-associated complication, possible pneumonia and probably pneumonia. The author, Michael Klompas, MD, MPH, was involved in a group convened by the CDC to develop new ventilator-associated pneumonia metrics. He identifies three major benefits of the new surveillance definitions:


1. "The opportunity to identify a population of patients who have serious complications that have previously not been acknowledged or attended to by quality-improvement programs," Dr. Klompas wrote.

2. Hospitals can benchmark their rates against peer institutions more effectively.

3. Hospitals have a routine benchmark for antibiotic prescribing in intensive care units.

More Articles on Infection Control:

Study: Quality Improvement Methods Improve Appropriate Antibiotic Use
Health Groups Recommend 5 Ways to Make Sterile Compounding Safer

4 Challenges ASCs Face in Standardizing Infection Control

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