A comparison of infection control software for use by hospital epidemiologists in meeting the new JCAHO standards.
To choose a microcomputer software package for our hospital epidemiology division, the two leading commercial software packages for infection control, AICE (ICPA, Inc., Austin, Texas) and NOS0-3 (Epi Systematics, Inc., Ft. Meyers, Florida), were compared for the types of epidemiologic analysis likely to be required to satisfy new Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) 1990 Infection Control Standards. The test dataset was a surgical database of 3,235 operations with 292 (9%) wound infections. Though NOSO-3 was more flexible in terms of the amount of data items one could record, it required seven times longer to learn, nine times more disk space to store and two times as long to enter cases than AICE. Six simple infection control reports (i.e., line listings, crosstabulations, stratified rates and graphs) required only seven computing steps and approximately 11 minutes to process with AICE, but 22 steps and over two hours with NOSO-3. All analytic results from AICE agreed with the results obtained with the Statistical Analysis System (SAS, SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, North Carolina), but analyses such as service-specific rates performed with NOSO-3 differed because of a design flaw in the NOSO-3 data structure.
LaHaise
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Department of Infection Control, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, California 91767.
D003428:Cross Infection / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000517:prevention & control; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D007591:Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations; D008838:Microcomputers; D012984:Software / Q000592:standards*; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States