As new diagnostic methods are developed, it is necessary to evaluate their performance in a particular hospital setting. New blood culture systems which permit automated 24 hour surveillance of incubating blood culture bottles have been introduced. The BacT/Alert is the earliest model commercially available. We have assessed the advantages and disadvantages of this new technology for detection of sepsis in the Clinical Center Patients. This study required several hundred positive blood cultures in order to determine the sensitivity, specificity, advantages, and disadvantages of the different blood culture methods. The results of the study showed that the BacT/Alert system is a reliable methodology for culturing blood. However, organism recovery and time to detection were not significantly improved as compared to the Isolator system. The BacT/Alert system did have sufficient advantages for anaerobic blood culture that we replaced our anaerobic BACTEC system with the BacT/Alert system for the anaerobic portion of blood cultures.
