Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. and the Center for Phlebotomy Education announced a collaborative training and education partnership dedicated to the prevention of blood culture contamination today at the HealthTrust Innovation Summit in Tucson, Arizona. The partnership is being formed to provide education on the challenges with 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.

Supporting these efforts, the continuing education course "Preventing Blood Culture Contamination with a Closed-System Mechanical ISDD®" is immediately available.  This 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. Each participant 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 the launch of this formal partnership, Magnolia Medical and The Center for Phlebotomy Education join forces 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 below 1%.

"The Center for Phlebotomy Education has been a true innovator and leader in healthcare practitioner education for over two decades. Our respective organizations share common goals: improve patient safety and quality of care, prevent healthcare-associated conditions, enable antibiotic stewardship and reduce unnecessary costs. We are thrilled about the opportunity to deliver on each of these key pillars with the launch of this industry-leading educational program," said Greg Bullington, CEO of Magnolia Medical.

"It is truly an honor to formalize this partnership with Dennis and his team as we combine efforts and focus with a shared commitment to eradicate false positive sepsis test results," said Bullington.