An openEHR based infection control system to support monitoring of nosocomial bacterial clusters and contacts
Early outbreak detection, allowing rapid intervention, is essential to reduce the burden of healthcare-associated pathogen transmission, including multidrug-resistant bacteria. Digital, routine data-driven solutions are promising, but often proprietary, non-interoperable, or limited in functional scope. The open-source Smart Infection Control System (SmICS) offers automatic calculations and interactive views on patients' movement and lab data, epidemic curves, contact networks, complemented by temporal-spatial visualizations. It is an open-source software based on openEHR as an interoperability standard and was evaluated by assessing time efficiencies in performing basic infection control tasks (e.g., contact networks) and usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS). Evaluated at three sites, SmICS reduced the time needed for performing routine infection control tasks by up to 81.47% (68.5 min (95%CI [30.5-106.5])) reaching a SUS of 51.6 points. The study reveals time savings through the use of SmICS in daily tasks, but also identified usability issues and a need for minimizing query waiting times.
Authors
- Tatiana von Landesberger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5279-1444)
- Pascal Biermann
- Claas Baier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3895-5446)
- Benedikt Zacher (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6107-6389)
- Tom Baumgartl (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5495-1544)
- Ann Christin Vietor
- Michael Storck
- Michael Behnke (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3993-9651)
- Markus Petzold (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6622-5550)
- Martin Kaase (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0144-8571)
Institutions
- Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (DE)
- University of Cologne (DE)
- Heidelberg University (DE)
- University of Münster (DE)
- Robert Koch Institute (DE)
- University Hospital Heidelberg (DE)
- Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (DE)
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE)
- University Hospital Münster (DE)
- University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (DE)
- Universitätsmedizin Göttingen (DE)
- Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE)
- University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus (DE)
- University of Göttingen (DE)
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE)
- University of Lübeck (DE)
- Technische Universität Braunschweig (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Digital Medicine
- Published
- 2025-06-30
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01795-9
- Citations
- 4
- Primary Topic
- Data-Driven Disease Surveillance
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 5.42
Funders
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung