An openEHR based infection control system to support monitoring of nosocomial bacterial clusters and contacts.
cross_sectional · Level IV
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40588668.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41746-025-01795-9 and PMC identifier 12209414.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Early outbreak detection, allowing rapid intervention, is essential to reduce the burden of healthcare-associated pathogen transmission, including multidrug-resistant bacteria. Digital, routine data-driven solutions are promising, but often proprietary, non-interoperable, or limited in functional scope. The open-source Smart Infection Control System (SmICS) offers automatic calculations and interactive views on patients' movement and lab data, epidemic curves, contact networks, complemented by temporal-spatial visualizations. It is an open-source software based on openEHR as an interoperability standard and was evaluated by assessing time efficiencies in performing basic infection control tasks (e.g., contact networks) and usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS). Evaluated at three sites, SmICS reduced the time needed for performing routine infection control tasks by up to 81.47% (68.5 min (95%CI [30.5-106.5])) reaching a SUS of 51.6 points. The study reveals time savings through the use of SmICS in daily tasks, but also identified usability issues and a need for minimizing query waiting times.