Streamlined sepsis management can save lives.
Diagnosing patients with suspected sepsis or BSI can feel like a race against time.
With pathogens becoming progressively resistant to available antibiotics,6 the risk of BSI patients
developing sepsis increases, and the opportunity for successful treatment decreases.
After early recognition, timely blood culture and follow-up diagnostics are vital for guiding targeted antimicrobial therapy.7
But the process is rarely that seamless, especially when your time and resources are already overstretched. Inconsistent collection practices can lead to underfilled bottles or contaminated blood cultures, both of which hinder your efforts toward a rapid, reliable diagnosis.8,9
When lives are on the line, how do you simplify the process?
One study showed that 90% of surveyed labs did not measure collected blood culture volumes, and only 4% of labs loaded all blood cultures into analysers within the recommended time.10
Does this sound like your institution?
This could mean that you're not revealing the full diagnostic picture.
BSIs can be missed, redraws may be necessary and appropriate antibiotic therapy could be delayed-all of which adds to the pressures you’re already under and can antibiotic stewardship more difficult, and potentially put patient outcomes on the line.
Claim your free downloadable guide to bringing speed and accuracy to your blood culture pathway
What does NHS England recommend?
Take a look at every stage of your blood culture pathway. What role can you play in getting the right treatment, to the right patient, at the right time?
It's important to start with the basics. NHS England recommends that for every patient, you should:11
- Collect at least two sets of blood culture (two aerobic and two anaerobic)
- Collect 8-10ml of blood per bottle**
- Load bottles into the blood culture analyser within 4 hours
Deviation from national microbiological guidelines increase the risk of inaccurate results and the need for re-testing, decreasing patient outcomes, contributing to antimicrobial resistance and increasing patient time in hospital.
Are you looking outside of the lab?
Technique is only part of the solution. To get more timely and accurate blood culture results inside the lab, you need to look outside the lab. You need a 360⁰ approach that considers the interdependencies between blood collection, blood culture and reporting.
Adopt a 360⁰ approach for better BSI management
A 360⁰ approach means connecting the right blood culture collection devices, testing tools, data insights, best practices and optimised workflows with an engaged and competent workforce at every phase of the testing pathway.
When you take a 360⁰ approach to BSI diagnostics, you can help remove avoidable errors, variability and process inefficiencies that burden your staff, consume your budget and erode patient care.
Interwoven accountability
Improve execution and increasing accountability along the full diagnostic pathway
Analytics excellence
Access near-real-time visibility and advanced analytics to generate meaningful insights
Cross-functionality
Share insights and aligning functions to drive sustainable improvements
The integrated, 360⁰ BD BSI Solution accompanies you across the full diagnostic pathway
Boost efficiency, safety and quality 
Reduce costs and complexity 
Translate data into actionable insights 
Expand visibility across the diagnostic pathway 
Evaluate and improve the diagnostic pathway 
Fast, accurate, comprehensive ID/AST results 
The design of the BD Vacutainer® UltraTouch™ Push Button Blood Collection Set offers a single-handed, in-vein safety activation that instantly retracts the needle at the push of a button, reducing accidental needlesticks by 64%-88% as compared to manual safety wingsets.12,13
When combined with the distinctive safety neck design of BD BACTEC™ Blood Culture Bottles, you eliminate the need for a separate adapter to draw blood into both blood culture bottles and blood collection tubes. This reduces risk that the device is used without an adapter, exposing the needle which could increase the risk of a needlestick injury.
What’s more, you may not only streamline and improve the blood culture collection process, but also enable near-patient incubation with the satellite capabilities of the BD BACTEC™ FX40 Instrument.
By leveraging BD Professional Services with insights generated from BD Synapsys™ Informatics, you may enhance efforts in lowering costs and complexity, while creating the potential to improve patient experience and outcomes across your health system.14 Partnering with BD, you can assess critical steps in the BSI diagnostic pathway and receive customised guidance to improve potential gaps, from collection to final results.
Ultimately, by removing unnecessary complexity from the collection process and equipping your staff with tools designed to work better and safer together, you have the potential to improve blood fill volumes and reduce turnaround time to support better patient experience and outcomes.
With the combination of BD Synapsys™ Informatics and BD BACTEC™ FX Blood Culture System, you have the potential to remove blind spots across the BSI diagnostic pathway.15
In addition, you can automate the process of translating data from multiple instruments and/or locations into actionable insights that can support day-to-day management and strategic planning decisions.
For example, you can:
- Analyse which hours of each day are busiest to identify and relieve staffing bottlenecks.
- Make the process of documentation for accreditation faster and easier.
The BD BACTEC™ Blood Culture System, powered by BD Synapsys™ Informatics, delivers the real-time data insights you need to improve laboratory efficiencies and enhance lab operations.
As an added advantage, you’ll be able to connect the dots between what is happening both outside and inside of the lab.
You can’t fix a problem that you can’t see. But with BD Synapsys™ Informatics, you will have this information at your fingertips and can use it to inform targeted improvements.
By capturing and consolidating data from across lab locations and from different collectors, you can uncover the hidden sources of inconsistencies, inaccuracies and inefficiencies along the BSI diagnostic pathway, all in a secure manner that helps you protect against cyberattacks.16
As part of BD Professional Services, the clinical and workflow specialists can help evaluate your BSI diagnostic process through a broader lens. You will receive an objective assessment of practices, workflows and utilisation of both consumables and instrumentation across all steps of the diagnostic pathway.
You’ll be able to focus on critical key performance indicators, including:
- Blood volume
- Contamination rate
- Turnaround time
- Productivity
You’ll also get recommendations on where and how you can make the most significant improvements-supported by the advanced analytics of the BD Synapsys™ Informatics Solution.
BD offers you diagnostic and process expertise combined with rich insights, enabling sustainable improvements both inside and outside of the lab.
The BD identification and susceptibility testing (ID/AST) systems are designed for speed and coverage, enabling you to expedite results for critical cases and support the appropriate use of antimicrobial therapy to treat BSIs.
For critical patients, when every hour counts, obtain results direct from positive blood culture with the Accelerate PhenoTest® BC Kit. This fully automated system is simple to use and may reduce time to results for minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) by more than 1 day compared to standard methods.9
Perform your rapid cleanup of positive blood culture with the Accelerate ARC® System or the MBT Sepsityper® CE-IVD Kit for ID preparation.
Comprehensively identify organisms with the help of the robust library and reliable performance of the benchtop-style BD™ Bruker MALDI Biotyper® Sirius System, which yields results from colony or direct from positive blood culture.
Provide clinicians with timely and accurate susceptibility results which leverage updated breakpoint guidelines and routine carbapenemase-producing organism (CPO) detection with the trusted performance of the BD Phoenix™ M50 System.
Streamline your BSI diagnostic pathway
The 360⁰ approach is designed to be tailored to your pathway, meeting you where you’re at.
Ready to learn more ?
Access your BSI resources
Click below to find a list of resources on how to improve your BSI diagnostics and blood culture pathways. Gain full access to customer testimonials, scientific resources, and tools to be deployed in the wards and help improve best practices.
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