Magnolia Medical and The Center for Phlebotomy Education form training partnership

Magnolia Medical Technologies and The Center for Phlebotomy Education formed a collaborative training and education partnership at the HealthTrust Innovation Summit in Tucson, Arizona to help prevent blood culture contamination – and have released the continuing education course Preventing Blood Culture Contamination with a Closed-System Mechanical ISDD®.

Specifically, the partnership is to provide education on the challenges of current practices and techniques used for blood culture collection, and new best practices to prevent contamination – with the goal of improving patient safety, quality of care, driving antibiotic stewardship and reducing hospital costs.

The new web-based course provides registered nurses, physician assistants, phlebotomists, hospital administrators and other licensed healthcare providers with the latest evidence-based best practices for preventing blood culture contamination. The course also analyses the impact of sepsis misdiagnosis on unnecessary and inappropriate antibiotic treatment, patient safety, and hospital costs as well as strategies to improve quality of patient care. All participants will earn one CEU credit hour toward their annual training and education requirements.

“We are excited to be partnering with Magnolia Medical to address one of the biggest problems plaguing our healthcare system today,” said Dennis Ernst, Founding Director of The Center for Phlebotomy Education. “Steripath® Gen2 is the evidence-based technology solution to a problem many thought could never be solved. This training and educational program effectively demonstrates the clinically proven combination of technique and technology to empower hospital staff to seize control of blood culture contamination rates and improve the lives of over a million people each year, all while saving the healthcare system billions of dollars.”

Each year, tens of millions of patients in the U.S. require a blood culture to help diagnose sepsis and other potentially deadly bloodstream infections. However, when current standard practices are followed, an average of 40 percent of positive results are actually false positives due to blood culture contamination.

A preassembled sterile, closed-system device, the Steripath Gen2 Initial Specimen Diversion Device® mechanically diverts, sequesters, and isolates the initial 1.5-2.0 mL of blood, the portion known to contain contaminants. The device then opens an independent sterile blood flow path for specimen collection. The technology has been clinically proven in peer-reviewed published controlled clinical studies to virtually eliminate blood culture contamination that can lead to the misdiagnosis of bloodstream infections like sepsis.

With this partnership, Magnolia Medical and The Center for Phlebotomy Education are working to provide the most advanced training and educational program to help drive practice change for blood culture collection. The collective goal of both organizations is to establish a new standard of care by resetting the benchmark false positive rate for blood culture results, which currently stands at 3%, to less than 1%.