A comprehensive decision support system for the identification, monitoring and management of patients with multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO).

While much progress has been made to prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAI), they remain a major cause of patient morbidity and mortality. Many traditional treatments are no longer effective due to the fast-growing antimicrobial resistance seen in healthcare and community settings. Up to 47% resistance has been seen in 78% of the most common microorganisms causing HAI. The global problems have experts urging the government to take this growing threat as seriously as those associated with bioterrorism. An equal challenge is for hospital administrators to provide dedicated resources to monitor these activities. Since the 1970s, active surveillance has been recognized as an essential component of every effective infection prevention/control program. A large portion of the Infection Control Professional's (ICP) time is spent gathering information (from rounds, microbiology, pharmacy and health records), documenting (comments, data entry, trend analysis, report generation) and answering questions. A 2-day pre-implementation survey from all sites reported ICPs spending 12hrs-35mins answering 114 questions related to MDROs; 51% of which may have been prevented with access to the surveillance system. In this session we will present the work done to evaluate ICP workflows, standardizing the identification, management and documentation of surveillance activities, system architecture, and demo the current system/reports.