Improving the work efficiency of healthcare-associated infection surveillance using electronic medical records

• We develop an integrated surveillance system (called iHAUTISIS) for improving the work efficiency of infection control.
• The iHAUTISIS can automatically collect surveillance data from EMRs and detect infected cases.
• Compare to the existing surveillance system, the iHAUTISIS can reduce 39% of an ICP's surveillance time for each patient.

In this study, we developed an integrated hospital-associated urinary tract infection (HAUTI) surveillance information system (called iHAUTISIS) based on existing electronic medical records (EMR) systems for improving the work efficiency of infection control professionals (ICPs) in a 730-bed, tertiary-care teaching hospital in Taiwan. The iHAUTISIS can automatically collect data relevant to HAUTI surveillance from the different EMR systems, and provides a visualization dashboard that helps ICPs make better surveillance plans and facilitates their surveillance work. In order to measure the system performance, we also created a generic model for comparing the ICPs’ work efficiency when using existing electronic culture-based surveillance information system (eCBSIS) and iHAUTISIS, respectively. This model can demonstrate a patient's state (unsuspected, suspected, and confirmed) and corresponding time spent on surveillance tasks performed by ICPs for the patient in that state. The study results showed that the iHAUTISIS performed better than the eCBSIS in terms of ICPs’ time cost. It reduced the time by 73.27 s, when using iHAUTISIS (114.26 s) and eCBSIS (187.53 s), for each patient on average. With increased adoption of EMR systems, the development of the integrated HAI surveillance information systems would be more and more cost-effective. Moreover, the iHAUTISIS adopted web-based technology that enables ICPs to online access patient's surveillance information using laptops or mobile devices. Therefore, our system can further facilitate the HAI surveillance and reduce ICPs’ surveillance workloads.