ArticleInfection control and hospital epidemiology2014
Cost analysis of strategies to reduce blood culture contamination in the emergency department: sterile collection kits and phlebotomy teams.
Article in Infection control and hospital epidemiology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Predictors and Clinical Impact of Positive Blood Cultures in Emergency Department Patients with Suspected Infection.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Article
- Multiyear experience with blood culture results from a tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia: a retrospective study.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Effectiveness of A Nurse-Led Multimodal Intervention in Preventing Blood Culture Contamination: A Before-and-After Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Clinical effects of bacteremia in sepsis patients with community-acquired pneumonia.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Direct costs of blood drawings with pre-analytical errors in tertiary paediatric hospital care.PloS one · 2023Article
- Identification of the main contributors to blood culture contamination at a tertiary care academic medical center.Infection prevention in practice · 2022Article
- Blood Culture Contamination: A Single General Hospital Experience of 2-Year Retrospective Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Regression discontinuity of blood culture contamination rate after changing of disinfectants: retrospective observational study.Scientific reports · 2021Observational
- Sites of blood collection and topical antiseptics associated with contaminated cultures: prospective observational study.Scientific reports · 2021Observational
- Actual Clinical Practice Related to Contaminated Blood Cultures May Limit the Cost Savings Associated with Interventions To Reduce Contamination Rates.Journal of clinical microbiology · 2020Article
- Blood culture contamination rates at different level healthcare institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa.Southern African journal of infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Practical Guidance for Clinical Microbiology Laboratories: A Comprehensive Update on the Problem of Blood Culture Contamination and a Discussion of Methods for Addressing the ProblemClinical microbiology reviews · 2019Review
- Impact of Emergency Department Phlebotomists on Left-Before-Treatment-Completion Rates.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2019Observational
- Improvement of blood culture contamination rate, blood volume, and true positive rate after introducing a dedicated phlebotomy team.European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology · 2019Article
- Estimated Clinical and Economic Impact through Use of a Novel Blood Collection Device To Reduce Blood Culture Contamination in the Emergency Department: a Cost-Benefit Analysis.Journal of clinical microbiology · 2019Article
- Blood Culture Contaminants in a Paediatric Population Retrospective study from a tertiary hospital in Oman.Sultan Qaboos University medical journal · 2017Article
- Cost and Utility of Microbiological Cultures Early After Intensive Care Unit Admission for Intracerebral Hemorrhage.Neurocritical care · 2017Article
- Healthcare-associated bloodstream infections in critically ill patients: descriptive cross-sectional database study evaluating concordance with clinical site isolates.Annals of intensive care · 2014Article
- Effectiveness of Multimodal Intervention to Improve Blood Culture Collection in the Emergency Department.Journal of global infectious diseasesArticle
- A Quality Improvement Initiative to Reduce Blood Culture Contamination in the Neonatal Unit.Pediatric quality & safetyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveBlood culture collection practices that reduce contamination, such as sterile blood culture collection kits and phlebotomy teams, increase up-front costs for collecting cultures but may lead to net savings by eliminating downstream costs associated with contamination. The study objective was to compare overall hospital costs associated with 3 collection strategies: usual care, sterile kits, and phlebotomy teams.
designCost analysis.
settingThis analysis was conducted from the perspective of a hospital leadership team selecting a blood culture collection strategy for an adult emergency department (ED) with 8,000 cultures drawn annually.
methodsTotal hospital costs associated with 3 strategies were compared: (1) usual care, with nurses collecting cultures without a standardized protocol; (2) sterile kits, with nurses using a dedicated sterile collection kit; and (3) phlebotomy teams, with cultures collected by laboratory-based phlebotomists. In the base case, contamination rates associated with usual care, sterile kits, and phlebotomy teams were assumed to be 4.34%, 1.68%, and 1.10%, respectively. Total hospital costs included costs of collecting cultures and hospitalization costs according to culture results (negative, true positive, and contaminated).
resultsCompared with usual care, annual net savings using the sterile kit and phlebotomy team strategies were $483,219 and $288,980, respectively. Both strategies remained less costly than usual care across a broad range of sensitivity analyses.
conclusionsEDs with high blood culture contamination rates should strongly consider evidence-based strategies to reduce contamination. In addition to improving quality, implementing a sterile collection kit or phlebotomy team strategy is likely to result in net cost savings.
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