Carle Targets HAIs with New Surveillance Software

Carle Hospital and Physician Group, based in Urbana, Ill., has deployed ICNet, the leading automated infection surveillance system, which monitors an array of clinical data streams and provides real-time alerts that allow infection prevention teams to identify affected patients more quickly and avert potential disease transmission.

ICNet, serving more than 1,000 hospitals globally including a growing number in North America has also provided Carles 345-bed hospital and multiple regional clinics with a pharmacy module that interfaces with the health systems electronic medical record system to ensure appropriate prescribing of antibiotics, detect and prevent adverse drug events, and provide more accurate and powerful reports on a wide range of quality-of-care metrics.

We are proud to be able to bring our infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship solutions to a healthcare provider with as strong a reputation for clinical excellence as Carle, says Adam Boris, ICNet Systems CEO. Implementing electronic surveillance is ever more important to achieve top-quartile performance in patient safety metrics to ensure maximum reimbursement from Medicare and provide meaningful improvement in national hospital quality scores.

We wanted an automated surveillance system that could take multiple data feeds, including device data, vital signs and lab results, bring these processes into a single system, and provide us with much more flexible reporting and alerting capability than we have had to date, says Daniel Bronson-Lowe, PhD, CIC, senior infection preventionist at Carle.

By filtering data and reducing the need for manual identification of potential infections, the software will allow Carles infection preventionists to spend more time improving care processes and working with staff, Bronson-Lowe says. ICNet will also be invaluable to us in reporting surgical data to state and federal agencies. It would be very difficult for an organization of our size to do that manually.

The system has been of particular value already in alerting staff to multiple-drug-resistant organisms (MDROs) such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, he said. The rise of MDROs in hospitals and other care settings is one reason that the federal government has stepped up reporting of infection data and prohibited reimbursements to treat healthcare-associated infections.