Aiming for Solid Consolidation and High Standard Standardization

Providence Health is a large, non-profit healthcare system encompassing 51 acute/inpatient labs across 7 states. Having a wide network of hospitals and laboratories in non-academic community healthcare spaces can make clinical microbiology initiatives surrounding consolidation and stewardship challenging. In this presentation, two large initiatives will be discussed: the creation of a regional microbiology core lab and establishing systemwide standardized blood culture contamination criteria and a new dashboard. For the regional core lab, data used to validate the method of transporting cultures via courier, models used to quantify potential time-to-result delays, areas for improved culture reporting metrics, and quality control measures will be presented. Addressing blood culture contamination (when normal skin bacteria are collected into patients’ blood cultures), is a major quality improvement goal as each contamination event can trigger unnecessary treatments, delay patient discharge and generate high costs. Clinical microbiology services helped standardize the system’s reporting strategy and support development of a dashboard to track and monitor these contamination events. Using this powerful new data source revealed some common, but unexpected error occurring during the process of blood culture collections that can be addressed. After viewing this lecture, participants should be able to: 1. Describe major and minor challenges inherent to microbiology laboratory consolidation related to testing, workforce, and quality control. 2. Identify specific areas and processes, for example culture setups and laboratory trainee education, that may require atypical or novel solutions due to consolidation. 3. Evaluate opportunities for lab-supported clinical stewardship initiatives, for example with blood culture contamination, strengthened by standardization. Richard Davis, PhD, D(ABMM), MLS(ASCP) Director of Microbiology WA/MT Microbiology Core Lab Providence Healthcare, Spokane WA Medical Director – Providence Microbiology Technical Workgroup 01/21/26 The University of Washington is committed to ensuring digital accessibility in our services, programs, and activities. If you encounter accessibility barriers using videos found on this channel, please contact UW Video at uwvideo [at] uw [dot] edu.