Impact on blood cultures pre-analytical quality and positivity rate of a key performance indicators digital monitoring approach: a pre–post intervention study

Abstract

Blood cultures (BCs) remain essential for diagnosing bloodstream infections, but their yield depends largely on pre-analytical phase quality. We evaluated the impact of an intervention guided by a digital platform for blood culture key performance indicators (KPIs) automated extraction in a single-center pre-post study. Following interventions, including feedback reports and staff education, solitary blood culture rate decreased by 71.7%, blood volume per episode increased by 7 mL per episode, and contamination rates improved. Contextually, the rate of true positive BCs relatively increased by ≅18%. Digital KPIs monitoring combined with targeted corrective interventions was associated with sustained improvements in BCs quality across hospital areas.