Economic aspects of preventing health care-associated infections in the intensive care unit.

Infection prevention is critical to providing a high standard of care in the intensive care unit (ICU). Recent focus on eliminating health care–associated infections (HAIs) has met with variable results. Although evidence-based as far as their components, policy-driven bundled HAI prevention interventions have been evaluated in a limited and potentially biased fashion for their effectiveness, and analyses of their cost-effectiveness are lacking. We use ventilator-associated pneumonia as the case study to illustrate the pitfalls and challenges of arriving at the optimal HAI preventive strategies in the ICU.