
Thousands of hospital patients die every year from infections that start in a central line, a catheter used to inject life-saving medications directly into the bloodstream. One infection can add two to three weeks and a whopping $55,000 to a patient’s hospital stay. Even worse, up to 25 percent of patients who come down with a central line infection die from it—a staggering number considering that 41,000 such infections are recorded in the U.S. each year.
“Central line infections are life-threatening, costly and completely preventable,” says Sarah Goldberg, MD, a fellow in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU).
The problem is that the catheter’s hub—the port where it enters the body—is exposed to bacteria in the world around it. If clinicians don’t thoroughly clean the hub before each use, they risk pushing bacteria straight into a patient’s blood. But that brings up a second problem.