Development of a reference information model and knowledgebase for electronic bloodstream infection detection.

The most prevalent hospital-acquired infections in the United States are bloodstream infections (BSIs) associated with the presence of a central venous catheter. There is currently a movement, including national organizations such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as well as consumer, quality improvement and patient safety groups, encouraging the standardization of reporting and aggregation of such nosocomial infection data to increase and improve reporting, and enable rate comparisons among healthcare institutions. Domain modeling is a well-known method for designing interoperable processes that take advantage of existing data and legacy systems. We have combined such a model-driven design approach with the use of partitioned clinical and business logic knowledgebases in order to employ a previously validated electronic BSI surveillance algorithm in the context of a multi-center study.