Development of an Automated Hospital Infection Control Surveillance Toolkit

Abstract

Background:Infection control systems allow the healthcare facility to detect, manage, prevent and control the infection or risk of infection. It helps to improve healthcare quality by allowing hospital infection control (HIC) team to focus on prevention and intervention efforts during the outbreaks.Objectives:To design, develop and implement an automated HIC surveillance Toolkit for Infection Prevention and Control Department based on user requirements.Methods:This study was carried out in a multi-speciality hospital in Southern India. The study was carried out in four phases; the first phase included the observation of current documentation practice of Infection Prevention and Control Department. During the second phase, a formal discussion was conducted with the infection control team to collect the data to add to the HIC surveillance toolkit. The third phase included the design and development of the toolkit using ASP.NET and Standard Query Language (SQL) database server. During the fourth phase, a prospective cross-sectional survey was conducted to assess the end-user satisfaction towards the Toolkit using a structured and validated checklist based on 5-point Likert scale from extremely satisfied to not satisfied (score 5–1).Results:Based on the observation of existing documentation and reporting practice, a discussion was carried out with the infection control team to identify the templates to be added to the toolkit. Once identified, a web-based toolkit was designed and developed using ASP.NET and stored using SQL database server. The developed toolkit was implemented in the hospital and provided to the HIC team to use. The finding of the assessment of 15 features of HIC surveillance toolkit indicated that the end-users were very satisfied with the support of toolkit in documenting and reporting of infection-related data.Conclusion:HIC surveillance toolkit, allows the HIC team to capture, store, manage data, compare, and calculate the infection control rate and compliance rate. It also increases the ease of surveillance and reporting. It aids in reducing hospital-acquired infection (HAI) rates, simplifies the workflow of HIC and improves healthcare quality.