October 18, 2022 – BD and Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc., announced a co-exclusive commercial agreement aimed at helping U.S. hospitals reduce blood culture contamination to help improve testing accuracy and ultimately improve clinical outcomes.
Under the agreement, BD and Magnolia Medical will both co-sell and co-market Magnolia Medical’s Steripath® and Steripath® Micro Initial Specimen Diversion Device® platforms, complementing the BD specimen collection portfolio, including BD Vacutainer® push button and BD Vacutainer® UltraTouch™ blood collection sets.
Steripath® is the only FDA 510(k)-cleared device platform specifically indicated to reduce blood culture contamination for sepsis testing accuracy. The Steripath® Initial Specimen Diversion Devices divert and sequester the initial 1.5 to 2 mL of potentially contaminated blood from the sample and then collect blood for blood cultures.
The Steripath platform offers the only all-in-one devices clinically proven to meet the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute’s (CLSI) new 1% blood culture contamination goal and new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines to reduce blood culture contamination. The CDC guidelines specifically recommend use of Initial Specimen Diversion Devices [which] divert the initial 1 to 2 mL of potentially contaminated blood and then collect blood for blood culture.
“Sepsis is the number one cause of death, readmissions and costs in hospitals today,” said Brooke Story, BD Integrated Diagnostic Solutions president. “It’s estimated that up to 56% of positive blood cultures can be contaminated during collection. Reducing blood culture contamination can help improve testing accuracy and ultimately improve clinical outcomes and may lessen the threat of antibiotic resistance by giving health care practitioners more specific, reliable results.”
To date, 20 studies have been completed supporting the clinical and cost effectiveness of Steripath. All clinical studies reported sustained contamination rates of 1% or less using Steripath and a study achieved a 31% reduction in vancomycin days of therapy.
Steripath has been adopted by hundreds of U.S. hospitals and health care systems to address the problem of blood culture contamination, which can lead to sepsis misdiagnosis resulting in unnecessary, prolonged, and harmful antibiotic treatment, extended length of hospital stay, false-positive CLABSIs, and wasted health care resources.