Development of an infection surveillance project for home healthcare.

Individual home care agencies must begin to take responsibility for gathering and analyzing data on infections that occur in the home. This is the only way to determine whether the infections are related to home care services or to other factors in the patient's environment. The Infection Surveillance Project was born out of the need for reliable and useful information on infection rates in home care. The need to be able to identify this information within individual companies and the industry as a whole takes on greater importance with managed care and accrediting bodies.