Building an Inferential Model between Caregivers and Patients by using RFID

Nosocomial (i.e., hospital-acquired) infections (NI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitals. NI rate is higher in intensive care units (ICU) than in the general ward due to patients with severe symptoms, poor immunity, and accepted many invasive therapies. Contact behaviors between health caregivers and patients is one of the infect factors. It is difficult to obtain complete contact records by traditional method of retrospective analysis of medical records. This paper establishes a contact history inferential model (CHIM) intended to extend the use of Proximity Sensing of rapid frequency identification (RFID) technology to transferring all proximity events between health caregivers and patients into clinical events (close-in events, contact events and invasive events).The results of the study indicated that the CHIM can infer proximity care activities into close-in events and contact events. The infection control team could redesign and build optimal workflow in the ICU according to the patient-specific contact history which provided by our automatic tracing system.

Authors:

• Yung-Ting Chang
• Chung-You Tsai
• Yu-Chuan Li

Keywords:

• Active Radio Frequency Identification
• Intensive Care Unit
• Nosocomial Infections

References:

[1] WHO, World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/emc
[2] Eggimann P, Pittet D. Infection control in the ICU. Chest 2001;
120:2059-93.
[3] Vincent LJ, Bihari DJ, Suter PM, et. al. The prevalence of nosocomial
infection in intensive care units in Europe: result of the EPIC study.
JAMA 1995; 274:639-644.
[4] Hajo Grundmann, Sina Barwolff, Adriana Tami, et.al.How many
infections are caused by patient to patient transmission in intensive care
units. Crit Care Med 2005 Vol. 33, No. 5:946-951.
[5] Garner JS, Favero MS. CDC guidelines for the prevention and control
of nosocomial infections. Guideline for handwashing and hospital
environmental control. AJIC. 1986;14(3):110-115.
[6] Jongchul Song, Carl T. Haas, Carlos H. Caldas. A proximity-based
method for locating RFID tagged objects. Advanced Engineering
Informatics 2007; 367-376
[7] Jill A. Fisher, Torin Monahan, Tracking the social dimensions of RFID
systems in hospitals. International journal of medical informatics 2008;
176-183
[8] Yung-Ting Chang, Chung-You Tsai, Pei-San Lee , Yu-Chuan Li. Using
Active RFID for Proximity Sensing-Capturing Nosocomial Infections
in MICU. Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics
2009,Hiroshima, Japan,2009