How do we stop infectious disease transmission while patients are in the hospital?

Alexander Sundermann, Dr.P.H., assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, looks into one way to do so.

Since 2015, Dr. Alexander Sundermann has been part of the Microbial Genomic Epidemiology Laboratory (MiGEL) studying the impact of whole genome sequencing surveillance with machine learning of electronic health record data to more quickly detect and better intervene upon healthcare outbreaks compared to traditional infection prevention methods. Our results demonstrate that healthcare outbreaks are very often missed by traditional methods, significantly undercounted, and could save lives and costs attributed to these outbreaks.

Outbreak Detection System Saves Lives

People go to hospitals to get better. But, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 31 hospitalized patients get an infection that they didn’t come in with. Such infections can require additional treatment, prolonging the hospital stay and increasing medical costs. And some patients die of their infections.

Our research team worked with infection preventionists at UPMC to develop an infectious diseases detection platform that uses increasingly affordable genomic sequencing to analyze infectious disease samples from patients like DNA fingerprinting. When the platform detects that two or more patients have near-identical strains of an infection, it flags the results for the hospital’s infection prevention team to find the commonality and stop the transmission.

We tested this platform for two years at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh. During that time, it prevented 62 infections and five deaths. And it net a savings of nearly $700,000 in infection treatment costs – a 3.2-fold return on investment.

This is not a standard practice anywhere. If health care facilities across the U.S. adopt this platform, a nationwide outbreak detection system could be developed, similar to the one used to stop outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. Had such a system existed in 2023, it could have stopped an outbreak of deadly bacteria linked to contaminated eye drops far earlier.

I hope that our findings will contribute to ongoing conversations among U.S. health care leadership, payors and policymakers about the benefits of genomic infectious diseases surveillance as a standard practice in health care. Nobody should go to the hospital to get better, only to catch a preventable deadly infection.

Read More:

[Oxford Academic] – Real-Time Genomic Surveillance for Enhanced Healthcare Outbreak Detection and Control: Clinical and Economic Impact

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