Money Saved with Infection-Finding System

Surgical patients account for 30 percent of patients diagnosed with sepsis, a 2009 study reported. Of the patients who get sepsis, between 28 percent and 50 percent of them will die, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Sepsis is normally a surgical site infection for surgical patients, and it’s caused by fungal infections, like Candida, and bacterial infections.

Time is money in healthcare, but it’s also patient welfare, Dr. Peter G. Pappas, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, said. He was a principal investigator in the T2 Biosystems-funded clinical trial when it was undergoing its FDA clearance. “The holy grail for treating people who are actually ill, have a fever and presume sepsis, is being able to identify the pathogen early and treat it specifically,” he said. “There’s a huge difference in 12, 24 or 48 hours in terms of survival.”

Together, T2Candida Panel and T2Dx make this possible by turning around a blood test for Candida and its species in an average of four hours, instead of two to five days, like a blood culture would. This system has been proven to reduce mortality rates from about 40 percent to as low as 11 percent, according to the study published in Future Microbiology.

“This is a major step forward, and, if it can be developed so it also includes bacteria… it will be a huge game shifter,” he said. When he first started offering feedback to T2 Biosystems on the device, he said he was impressed with the science behind the hypothesis. “In the beginning, it was a little shaky, because the technology was new, and the machines were new, but with each month as we got deeper into the trial and got more involved in the clinical work… the use became fairly easy,” he confirmed.

New data published in Future Microbiology proves it saves money, in addition to detecting yeast responsible for fungal infections. If a patient had a blood culture test for Candida, the hospital stay, anti-fungal treatment and diagnostic test would all cost a patient $2,411.49 for a blood culture test. This has been the standard approach. If the T2 Candida strategy was used, they pay $1,262, and have the results a few days sooner.

Patients diagnosed with Candida can expect to pay $28,212 if they started with the T2Candida method, versus $55,099 for those who were diagnosed with the blood culture strategy, because the longer length of stay.

Like all equipment, while this may provide faster results, save money and maybe save lives, Pappas said some facilities would benefit from it more than others. He thinks larger facilities with many Candida cases would get the most out of it.

Clinical Trial

Pappas’ facility was one of 12 centers that participated in the clinical trial T2 Biosystems’ FDA approval was based on. Combined, they took whole blood samples from 1801 consenting patients who were at high risk for Candida. While most of these were tested to see if the patient had a strain of Candida, 300 were contrived. Of these, 250 samples were spiked with Candida and 50 were negative samples. The results were broken down to the Candida species and showed:

100 percent accuracy with low and high concentrations for C. parapsilosis

97.2 percent accuracy for low concentrations of detection of C. glabrata, and a 98.1 percent rate for high concentrations.

95.4 percent accuracy for low concentrations of detection of C. albicans, and a 99.1 percent rate for high concentrations.

100 percent accuracy rate for negative tests.