A nosocomial infection is an infection contracted in a health establishment. The term “nosocomial” is derived from the greek nosos, disease and from Komein treat, both of them come up with the word nosokomeion, hospital
For an infection to be called nosocomial or hospital, it has to be absent when the patient checks in the hospital and has to be developed at least 48 hours after his or her admission. This delay allows to make the difference between a community acquisition infection and a nosocomial infection. This criterion does not have to be applied with no further focus, instead it is recommended to appreciate, in critical cases, the plausibility of the link between hospitalization and infection.
In case of surgery infections, the infection is considered as nosocomial if it happens to appear within the thirty days after the surgery. This delay is extended over one-year if there is an implementation of the prosthetic material. In other terms, any infection that comes to exist on a surgical scar following the year of the surgery, even though the patient left the hospital, maybe considered as nosocomial.
In a typical hospital environment, the infection prevention teams lose a precious time when following manually the results of blood and urine analysis.
Teams examine, as well, clinical data such as patients having fever and who are bearers of central or urinary catheter in order to identify the populations of patients having contracted nosocomial infections while being hospitalized. Nonetheless, even if teams identified nosocomial infections, they
would have to keep track of these patients in order to follow intern and extern alert measures. Due to this follow-up approach that requires a lot of time, infection prevention specialists are not supposed to spend their time doing their best, that is prevent infections.
Nevertheless, an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) decrease the team’s need for following manually patients who received an intravenous catheter or a urinary catheter within the framework of their treatment. In using data and visualizations in near real time, infection prevention specialists can rapidly have a look at reports automatically generated and easy to read in order to identify the real infections rates. After that, they can focus on education, clinical interventions related to hand hygiene and sterile techniques of the catheter placement and the analysis of risk patient to provide other prevention strategies.
Technology itself cannot reduce the nosocomial infections. The culture of health system has to be dedicated to the change management in using qualified data to improve results. Committing to alter culture has to start by heads of hospitals, physicians and clinicians. More specifically, leadership in preventing infections has to be engaged to gather a multidisciplinary team to prevent infections, clinicians and highly-qualified financial experts who will work hand-in-hand to ensure better conformity results in their practices.
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