 RICT: RFID Infection Control TechnologyVecna continues its research into resource location and tracking tools for Infection Control Practitioners (ICP's) in hospitals. Our goal is to provide ICP's with more effective methods to track the agents that may be spreading infections, and better ways for ICP's to identify the time, source, and location of outbreaks. The work so far has produced very promising results, and Vecna is proceeding with further work to develop better preventive measures including enhanced means to manage, control and reduce the impact of health care-acquired infection (HAI) outbreaks. The risk of acquiring an infection while hospitalized is very real. A hospital brings patients with weakened immune systems in close proximity with patients, or staff that may be carriers of infectious organisms. Agents of transmission of infection within hospitals include other patients, medical and nursing personnel, equipment, air, water and fomites. A chain of transmission describes how a particular infectious organism is passed between any or all of the agents of transmission listed above, eventually ending in one or multiple new hospital-acquired infections. By tracking the movements of patients and staff, low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags can be used to deduce the chain of transmission of hospital-acquired infections, thus enabling ICPs to halt the spread of infectious outbreaks and institute changes to prevent further outbreaks. The thrust of Vecna's work is in developing a unique graphical system that enables the representation and visualization of people and resource interaction using intimacy scoring capabilities. |
The tools that have been developed can be used for not only mapping and visualizing interactions, but also for analyzing people and resource related transmission patterns. A key part of the new work is to integrate the new tools with QC PathFinder™, the powerful infectious disease surveillance system already in field use at government and commercial hospitals around the country. Another key aspect of the current work is to refine the system design and to validate the visualization and analysis tools used to collect historical location data, patient and staff interaction data, as well as data from the microbiology lab, pharmacy, surgical, radiology, critical care and other sources to better identify propagation agents, at risk patients, and propagation patterns. It is essential for ICP's to have event detection based surveillance systems that incorporate the epidemiology of prospect infectious agents, with better ways to use graph specific measures for the purpose of predicting the impact of any infectious outbreak including identifying the most likely patients and staff at risk, and assessing how transmissions might propagate under varying sets of conditions. VECNA is meeting that need with the progressive release of more and more robust and powerful tools in this field. To make this interface truly intuitive and opportunistic for the ICP is key to the vision of Vecna and the team at Vecna is using a paradigm it calls SWIM™(See What I Mean), a concept that is based on an often employed Graphical User Interface(GUI) technique called DWIM(Do What I Mean) and WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get), so that the ICP is in control, more like being at the helm, with the ability to use views of the environment to see new views based on what they believe is happening with the transmission pattern that is emerging. |
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