title: Knowledge-based surveillance for preventing postoperative surgical site infection.
abstract: At least one out of every twenty people admitted to a Canadian hospital will acquire an infection. These hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) take a profound individual and system-wide toll, resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional expenses each year. Surveillance for HAIs is essential to develop and evaluate prevention and control efforts. In nearly all healthcare institutions, however, surveillance for HAIs is a manual process, requiring highly trained infection control practitioners to consult multiple information systems and paper charts. The amount of effort required for discovery and integration of relevant data from multiple sources limits the current effectiveness of HAIs surveillance. In this research, we apply knowledge modeling and semantic technologies to facilitate the integration of disparate data and enable automatic reasoning with these integrated data to identify events of clinical interest. In this paper, we focus on Surgical Site Infections (SSIs), which account for a relatively large fraction of all hospital acquired infections.
authors: McGill Clinical & Health Informatics, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1A3 Canada. arash.shaban-nejad@mcgill.ca
authors: Arash
authors: A
authors: Shaban-Nejad
authors: Gregory W
authors: GW
authors: Rose
authors: Anya
authors: A
authors: Okhmatovskaia
authors: Alexandre
authors: A
authors: Riazanov
authors: Christopher J O
authors: CJ
authors: Baker
authors: Robyn
authors: R
authors: Tamblyn
authors: Alan J
authors: AJ
authors: Forster
authors: David L
authors: DL
authors: Buckeridge
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001331:Automation; D003428:Cross Infection / Q000517:prevention & control*; D003625:Data Collection; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D017053:Infection Control; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D008490:Medical Informatics; D011183:Postoperative Complications / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011184:Postoperative Period; D012307:Risk Factors; D012660:Semantics; D014946:Wound Infection / Q000517:prevention & control*