Blood Infections Plunge 40% Under Safety Protocol

Tooke said that his hospital implemented the program after seeing Pronovost's success at Johns Hopkins and in the Keystone hospital collaborative in Michigan, which used a similar model to reduce infection rates there.

"It had a profound impact, a shift in our thinking, that it was actually possible to eliminate something we had come to think of as inevitable.  It meant that the only acceptable target was zero.

"At Shore, we're the community's only healthcare system. Our patients are neighbors, coworkers, and often members of our own family, so targeting zero struck a very personal core."

Pronovost explained that CUSP was successfully only when providers think of it as one leg of a three-legged stool.  "It's a checklist for best practices, CUSP—the culture change and teamwork program—and then it's measuring and feeding back (what you learn) from all three."