‘Bandages’ for hospital beds mend budgets
It’s a twisted irony that Canadian hospitals are responsible for making 200,000 people sick every year, 8,000 of whom die, the Public Health Agency of Canada says.
That’s roughly 22 deaths a day from what doctors and nurses describe as hospital-acquired infections, or HAIs. To curb the prevalence of these infections, hospitals and clinics of all sizes have fastened hand sanitizers to their walls, doled out rubber gloves and masks and even gowns, in some cases, to visitors. Still, the costly problem persists.
As a result of pressure from medical insurers, hospitals in the United States have put a dollar figure on the cost of HAIs, said Fabrizio Chiacchia, president and chief executive officer of Calgarybased Surface Medical Inc. “Every single hospital-acquired infection costs the hospital between $25,000 and $40,000.”
Hospitals in Canada and the U.S. are under significant pressure to reduce their prevalence in their facilities.
Surface Medical, founded in 2010, is one of several companies providing a commercial solution to this medical problem. The company manufactures CleanPatch, designed to function like a BandAid for hospital beds.
Rips and tears in hospital beds can become breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses, which are brought in by sick patients and left behind, because of the difficulty of cleaning the fabric exposed in a damaged mattress.
“There’s really good evidence in the scientific literature that shows that damaged or contaminated mattresses result in the transmission of disease,” Chiacchia said. “The literature goes even further to show that if you can replace or restore those surfaces to an intact state, then you can actually stop an outbreak or reduce the transmission of those diseases.”
“Theoretically, as you’re changing over mattresses and patients on a very rapid basis, anything that gets inside the interior of the mattress that is unobserved and not available to the naked eye, has the potential to get pushed out as you put weight on the mattress,” said Dr. John Conly, Alberta Health Services Calgary medical director for infection prevention and control and a professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.
Before joining Surface Medical in 2010, Chiacchia and the company’s three founders, Tom Collins, Barbara Potter and Jeff Schacter, provided a research grant to graduate students at a Canadian university — he won’t say which one, for fear of embarrassing the affiliated hospital — to investigate the prevalence of dirty rips in mattresses.
“What we found is that 47 per cent of the mattresses had damage and a number of them had something growing inside of them,” Chiacchia said.
Surface Medical was formed shortly thereafter, and it now sells CleanPatches to 225 hospitals in Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
Chiacchia is keen to bring those numbers up as hospitals around the world look to reduce or eliminate the prevalence of HAIs. A fact sheet on HAIs circulated by the World Health Organization says, “Of every 100 hospitalized patients at any given time, seven in developed and 10 in developing countries will acquire at least one health care-associated infection.”
“Damaged mattresses occur very frequently in hospitals and hospitals frequently don’t have any choice,” Chiacchia said. “They can either do nothing and put patients at risk of infection, or replace it at a very high direct cost.”
He said the price of a hospital mattress is about $500 — though that figure can rise to $10,000 for specialized mattresses, such as those found in burn units and critical care facilities.
Surface Medical has priced its CleanPatch at roughly a twentieth of the cost of a new mattress (the cost varies from country to country) in the hopes that when a mattress is damaged, medical staff can quickly repair it rather than get approvals to dispose of it, then budget approvals to replace it with a new one.
“A health-care customer can make 20 repairs for less than the cost of a new mattress,” Surface Medical’s vice-president of business development Tony Abboud said. “This allows them to save a significant amount of money, while enhancing patient safety.”
As Dr. Conly, who has no dealings with Surface Medical, said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Of course, mattresses aren’t the only places in hospitals where infections can spread. Chiacchia, Abboud and the team at Surface Medical have ambitions to expand the product line to include solutions for all types surfaces.