Cost analysis of strategies to reduce blood culture contamination in the emergency department: sterile collection kits and phlebotomy teams.

Objective: Blood 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.

Design: Cost analysis.

Reducing blood culture contamination in community hospital emergency departments: a multicenter evaluation of a quality improvement intervention.

Objectives: Blood culture contamination is a common and preventable problem in the emergency department (ED). In a previous single-center study, changing the process of ED blood culture collection from the traditional "clean," nonsterile procedure to a fully sterile procedure with standardized use of sterile gloves, large-volume chlorhexidine skin antisepsis, and fenestrated sterile drapes resulted in a substantial reduction in contamination. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of this sterile blood culture collection process for reducing blood culture contamination in two community hospital EDs.