Medical Resources

UCLA Emergency Medicine Develops Interactive Website To Help Healthcare Workers Exposed to Patient Bodily Fluids

One of the most frightening experiences for healthcare workers is sustaining an accidental needlestick or bodily fluid splash and thus facing the possibility of exposure to HIV, hepatitis or other diseases patients carry.

To help doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals make decisions about how to manage such occupational exposures, the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine has developed an interactive Website.

The Website, named "Needlestick," was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is based upon new guidelines the CDC released on June 29 for managing and documenting occupational exposures to blood and other bodily fluids. The original research leading to the website's development was sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). With AHRQ funding, researchers studied real-time access to clinical guidelines by emergency department care workers exposed to body fluids. The site, www.needlestick.mednet.ucla.edu, functions as a smart electronic medical record. It guides the healthcare provider in acquiring relevant data and selecting appropriate laboratory tests and treatments. Once the case is complete, the healthcare provider may print case-specific aftercare instructions to be given to the exposed healthcare worker and included in the medical record.

Each case is managed anonymously, because the site does not collect identifying information about the exposed healthcare worker or the source of the bodily fluid.

"This project truly exploits the potential of the World Wide Web as a means of implementing quality improvement," said David Schriger, MD a UCLA professor of Emergency Medicine who led development of the site. "Now any healthcare provider in the world who has Web access can insure they are providing care that is consistent with CDC guidelines, simply by using this free service."

"The existence of a site that provides any easy tool for the management of actual cases has considerable advantages over other methods of disseminating a guideline, such as paper or electronic publishing," Schriger added. "In the latter case, the healthcare provider must still read, understand and remember the guidelines content. With Needlestick, the provider simply must answer the questions in good faith and carefully consider the recommendations."

Another advantage of this method of healthcare delivery, Schriger pointed out, is that when the CDC updates the occupational exposure guidelines again, modifications of a single computer should change practices much more rapidly than traditional methods of information dissemination.