A web-based, hospital-wide health care-associated bloodstream infection surveillance and classification system: Development and evaluation

Abstract

Background: Surveillance of health care-associated infections is an essential component of infection prevention programs, but conventional systems are labor intensive and performance dependent. Objective: To develop an automatic surveillance and classification system for health care-associated bloodstream infection (HABSI), and to evaluate its performance by comparing it with a conventional infection control personnel (ICP)-based surveillance system. Methods: We developed a Web-based system that was integrated into the medical information system of a 2200-bed teaching hospital in Taiwan. The system automatically detects and classifies HABSIs. Results: In this study, the number of computer-detected HABSIs correlated closely with the number of HABSIs detected by ICP by department (n=20; r=.999 P