title: Computer surveillance of hospital-acquired infections: a 25 year update.
abstract: Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) are a significant cause of patient harm and increased healthcare cost. Many states have instituted mandatory hospital-wide reporting of HAIs which will increase the workload of infection preventionists and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is no longer paying hospitals to treat certain HAIs. These competing priorities for increased reporting and prevention have many hospitals worried. Manual surveillance of HAIs cannot provide the speed, accuracy and consistency of computerized surveillance. Computer tools can also improve the speed and accuracy of HAI analysis and reporting. Computerized surveillance for HAIs was implemented at LDS Hospital in 1984, but that system required manual entry of data for analysis and reporting. This paper reports on the current functionality and status of the updated computer system for HAI surveillance, analysis and reporting used at LDS Hospital and the 21 other Intermountain Healthcare hospitals.
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics, Intermountain Healthcare; Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah School of Medicine, USA.
authors.forename: R Scott
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: Rouett H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Abouzelof
authors.forename: Caroline W
authors.initials: CW
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Vickie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Anderson
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sumner
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Soutter
authors.forename: Ruth
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kleckner
authors.forename: James F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Lloyd
mesh_terms: D003428:Cross Infection / Q000453:epidemiology*; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D009096:Multi-Institutional Systems; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D014481:United States; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014589:Utah