Blood Culture Contamination Rate Tracking and Reporting
Channel: R Consortium
Date: 2023-08-03

Rebecca Ramesh, PGY-1 Pathology Resident at Penn Medicine

Blood culture contamination leads to unnecessary antibiotic exposure and prolonged hospitalization. Contamination occurs during collection, either from contact with the patient’s skin, the hub, or cannula of an indwelling catheter, due to poor collection technique and/or inadequate skin disinfection. At Penn Medicine, tracking the blood culture contamination rate has been a manual and arduous process, performed quarterly, and usually reported months after quarter-end. Methods: This project has involved automating the calculation and reporting of the blood culture contamination rate at our facility, using an R markdown script that outputs a comprehensive PDF report. This report takes just minutes to run, and includes hospital and floor-level blood culture contamination rates, trends over time, single set blood draw rates, common contaminants, and a list of specific contamination events. 

Results: This automated reporting has allowed floors/departments with contamination events to implement interventions in real-time to reduce their contamination rate, including identifying individual healthcare staff that requires further education on sterile technique.

Main sections

0:00 Introduction
0:57 Blood culture contamination is a significant problem
1:10 Two blood culture sets should be drawn
2:43 How do we calculate the blood culture contamination rate?
3:58 Examples
5:38 Methodology 
7:56 Outcomes
8:40 R Packages 
8:58 Thank you!

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