Few have heard of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, but it has saved tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars
When I started my training in 1980, we accepted an arithmetic that would now be indefensible. Central lines, the catheters we threaded into the great veins of the critically ill, became infected, and some of those patients died. We recorded the deaths as complications. Almost no one thought of them as preventable, because no one had yet done the slow work of proving they were.
That work got done, and federal money paid for it. Beginning in 2008, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a small arm of the health department, funded a national effort in more than a thousand adult intensive care units: a checklist, a sterile insertion protocol, and a unit culture in which a nurse could stop a surgeon. Central-line bloodstream infections fell by 41%, from 1.915 to 1.133 per 1,000 catheter days. The agency estimates that effort alone averted between 290 and 605 deaths. Across its wider work on hospital-acquired harm, AHRQ’s own accounting credits 20,500 deaths prevented and $7.7bn saved in the four years from 2014 to 2017. Hardly any of my patients have heard of the agency. That was always rather the point.
Robert B Shpiner is an internist and clinical professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He has practiced and taught intensive care medicine for more than 40 years
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Few have heard of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, but it has saved tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollarsWhen I started my training in 1980, we accepted an arithmetic that would now be inde...
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