The goal of this system is a knowledge-based monitoring of germs and antibiotic sensitivity pattern, crossinfections, and nosocomial infections.

Surveillance of nosocomial infections is one of the prominent tasks for infection control teams in hospitals. Efficient surveillance needs to address various data sources within the hospital such as patient administration, laboratory and other diagnostics, clinical patient data management and patient care documentation. Within such enormous data loads epidemiological alerts tend to pass unrecognized if these data are not managed by computer.

The aim of this system is the monitoring of incoming data. Two kinds of monitoring are performed in this system: Monitoring of major collectives of patients (monitoring of germs and antibiotic sensitivity patterns, monitoring of crossinfections) and patient-oriented monitoring of suspected nosocomial infections.

For the first kind only microbiological data are of concern, for the second kind clinical patient data are essential as well.

Evaluation: All prototypes have been tested by the hospital infection control department, University of Vienna Medical School, for several months. The retrospective studies have shown that a routine use of the system for active monitoring could save much time for the members of the hospital infection unit. Immediately it reports all the defined alerts from the microbiological lab, so that urgent actions can be taken without loss of time. All other results are stored for further utilization, but the user does not need to check them.

At present the prototypes are being further developed and reimplemented for routine clinical use.

MONI has been developed by the Department of Medical Computer Sciences, the Department of Hospital Hygiene and the Department of Pediatrics, University of Vienna Medical School, Austria.

Klaus-Peter Adlassnig, klaus-peter.adlassnig@meduniwien.ac.at.

Core Unit for Medical Statistics and Informatics (MSI), Medical University of Vienna, Spitalg. 23, A-1090 Vienna, Phone: +431 40400 6668, Internet: http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/msi/mes/.