Detection and reporting of emergency hospital infections
developed by
clinical domains
keywords
Washington University, St. Louis
Infection control in hospitals
Rule-bases systems, alerts
location
commissioned
status
Barnes Hospital, Jewish Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri
February 1993
description
GermAlert is an expert system that contains rules for "infectious disease emergencies."
Most hospitals have infection control programs which are aimed at the
early detection and aggressive treatment of infections. The earlier an
infection is discovered and treated, the less likely it is to spread to
other patients and hospital staff - and the less likely it is to prolong
the infected patient's stay in the hospital. GermAlert applies local hospital
culture-based criteria for detecting emergency infections, which
require immediate treatment. GermAlert scans microbiology culture data from a hospital's laboratory
system and generates an "alert" to the
Infection Control staff
when a culture representing a "significant" infection is detected.
GermAlert has been deployed at Barnes
Hospital, a large tertiary-care teaching hospital, since February 1993.
It was later deployed at neighboring Jewish Hospital in July 1995.
Languages/Shells Used: generalized expert system shell (the GermWatcher Engine), CLIPS, Sybase ISQL scripts, Bourne shell scripts.
references
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"
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contact
links
Washington University School of Medicine
Department of Internal Medicine
Division of Medical Informatics
660 South Euclid Campus
Box 8005 St. Louis
Missouri 63110 USA.
Archive of AI systems in clinical practice previously administered by Enrico Coiera. Used with permission. Maintained and extended since 2001 by OpenClinical.
Entry on archive: October 27 1995 Last main update: July 10 2004
Medical Informatics at Washington University in St. Louis