For those of you who are "on the fence" about jumping on the data bandwagon and contributing to the solution of national comparison data collection, check out the winter edition of JAVA and the letter to the editor! As the editor Lois Davis states, it is insightful.
I agree that in order to move our profession of vascular access forward, we need unified, consistent data collection! If we want to move our practice ahead and actually begin to think about placing CVCs and sticking the IJ, we need to demonstrate how skilled we are now and the care we provide now is safe and improves patient outcomes and quality of care. With technology moving all our lives forward, let's capture the momentum of the future, and start collecting unified data! Are you up for the challenge of this and placing CVCs?
This is a great letter to the editor in JAVA! It should be a wake up call for all of us in the vascular access and IV therapy profession. If you are not collecting data, you have nothing to substantiate your practice and your value to hospital management.
If you are not participating with national data collection now that it is available, you have nothing to compare your results to and to show you are either better than the national averages or if you need education to improve your practice! How can anyone ask to do IJ placement and move your practice forward if you have no data to show value in your picc practice? The registry folks tell me they are going to make this the biggest and best quality project ever for nursing.
We think it is a great tool for us! If you are not using this, you are selling yourself short and will be left behind when it comes to firing nurses and downsizing picc teams.
I love this advancement about data and benchmarking. I am still struggling with the $1000 cost to join in and include our info. $1000 might seem like a small amount in the great scheme of healthcare costs, but when my budget is scrutinized as closely as it is, I might have a problem with this additional cost.
We might have to have a BAKE SALE to cover this expense! Who wants to buy a cupcake? Send money.
haha
Gwen
Thanks James for the positive comments!
Collecting data in isolation will not move our profession forward. All vascular access clinicians need to know how we compare and we need national benchmarks! Anytime I am with a group of vascular access professionals (INS, AVA, IVAN, APIC), the question of benchmarks and national averages always comes up. This is in fact what we are working towards with the registry.
Thought leaders all agree. Physicians participate in registries all the time. They (or someone else does it for them) enter all pertinent patient and procedural details for every procedure they perform. These registries cost between $5,000 and $60,000 per year! Yes, the www.piccregistry.com fee is only $995 – a very small fee. The reason for this is that it should not exclude any hospital in the country. Some hospitals are using the registry for Magnet recertification and/or initial certification (HUGE return here).
Gwen, I think it’s a shame you (we) as vascular access professionals and “interventional nurses” have to struggle to find $995 to insure quality of care in our patients and to ensure our performance is the best it can be. We absolutely are on the front line of care for all hospitalized patients and vascular access is how we deliver care to them! Just so you are aware, some teams have approached their quality department, nursing administration, hospital foundation, even Interventional Radiology or the cath lab to get the funds to participate in the PICC registry. If you have radiology backup at your hospital, see if you can show them the idea and then set up a time where you and they can talk to the leaders at www.piccregistry.com.
I would ask that anyone who responds to this thread disclose if they receive any $$ from CVAD Resources, LLC......this is not a commerical site. Thanks
Good point Mark! This site is not a commercial site; it’s a place to have robust conversation around how we do things as a group of professionals. We all log on here in an attempt to compare ourselves and to improve patient satisfaction and the quality of care we all deliver. We look for answers to our questions and post our thoughts and experiences on products, team development, we even give tips on navigating at the AVA conference and so much more. All this information is valuable.
I have not received a penny from CVAD Resources. I have networked with thought leaders, physicians and many others that are excited about the posibilities of national PICC data. ALL PRO BONO! I believe in this project and have provided clinical feed back as a Beta test site (as previously disclosed). I did one of two poster presentations and podium presentation on national data at AVA because I know this is what we need to do. ….collect unbiased comparative data!
I do think it is a shame that the cost of participating in a national database becomes an issue. I do not think that the dollars to participate should prevent us from participating. However, I do have to deal with the reality of our budget. Going over our budgeted expenses gets recognition at a higher level and requires data (that we don't have) to support the need to have this comparison to national data. Quite a quandary.
Am I then only one in this group that has budget issues to consider? Is our system the only one that is scrutinized for budget? How many managers are responding to this absolutely great opportunity to prove excellence vs. the expense vs. the budget? Am I alone?
I absolutely want more information to improve our program like this national registry offers. We have so many opportunites to prove that we are that excelllent, if only we have the opportunities to compare outcomes.
We support 10 hospitals in our area and have about 5,000 PICCs per year to track. Again, budget related: Does this mean that we pay $1000 per hospital? I haven't gotten an answer from the database owners.
I look forward to overcoing this obstacle of the budget. I won't give up.
Gwen