Cost-Effective Strategies to Control Clostridium difficile in the Hospital Setting

Gonzalo Bearman, MD, MPH, professor of medicine, and hospital epidemiologist, Department of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Virginia Commonwealth University, discusses a cost-effective way to control Clostridium difficile in the hospital setting.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“The economic assessment of controlling C. difficile kind of falls more in favor of using what’s called the bundled approach.

So, the bundled approach would be washing your hands, isolating the patients, detecting it as quickly and as feasibly as possible, doing proper disinfection or heightened disinfection throughout hospitalization, particularly at the end of hospitalization. When those are bundled together, and there was recently a paper that looked at this, it’s probably cost-effective to use that strategy for controlling C. difficile. It doesn’t take into account using new technologies, such as UVC robots, which are expensive.”