Fighting HAIs with AI

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) continue to be an ongoing threat to patients. “Despite the best care, patients get infections,” Brian Gross, business lead, genomics for infectious disease at Philips, told MD+DI. Because they are “technically avoidable, there’s pressure on hospitals to drive their numbers down.” Healthcare system professionals have struggled with two main problems when trying to identify and act on infection risks, Gross explained. “The problem is two-fold. First, because of current tools, all infections look the same,” he said. For instance, if a hospital diagnoses three babies with MRSA, the NICU may be shut down out of fear that the infection is spreading from infant to infant, but it may in fact have come from a parent or visitor. Such action is often taken before the source of infection is identified, Gross said. “Infections may look the same under the microscope—they are only differentiable if you look at their genomics,” he said. The second problem hospital systems often experience involves “false negatives,” Gross explained. “Infections are being transmitted, but no one knows it until there are multiple patients infected.” Better data analysis might be able to help hospitals tackle these issues an...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Software Source Type: news