Accreditation

Electronic surveillance systems increase efficiency

Ambulatory Quality and Compliance Insider, September 1, 2009

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Before elaborate computer software became available to medical facilities, IPs had to go through microbiology reports by hand, manually sorting and calculating rates and trends, says Joan Hebden, RN, MS, CIC, ¬director of IC at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and author of “Leveraging Surveillance Technology to Benefit the Practice and Profession of Infection Control,” published in the April 2008 American Journal of Infection Control.

“The major pro to using data-mining software is efficiency,” Hebden says. “You’ll have a perspective on what was done historically—and when I say historically, there are some ICPs that are still doing this—where you literally are printing out a report from your microbiology laboratory from all your abnormal results and then you have to go through that and sort it depending on what type of surveillance you are doing.”

The electronic data-mining systems today do away with the grueling, time-consuming process of manually tracking infections through printed reports. However, hospitals run into adversity when it comes time to purchase these systems because of price.

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