In a recent press release, RL Solutions, the creators of easy-to-use healthcare quality and safety software, announced updates to its RL6:Infection surveillance software.
With this new version, infection preventionists and antimicrobial stewardship teams will have access to the tools they need to move from reactive to proactive prevention of infection risks. RL will be previewing these enhancements at booth 1627 at APIC's annual conference, taking place June 14-16, in Portland, Oregon.
RL's surveillance software gives healthcare organizations meaningful, actionable data that they can use to prevent healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) and ensure the right drugs are reaching the right patients—at the right time and for the right duration. By sharing this information across the organization, facilities can work together to make better decisions that improve patient outcomes.
With that in mind, RL will be previewing new context-based syndromic surveillance (CBSS) technology that helps identify early indications of community disease clusters. Explains Sanjay Malaviya, president and CEO, RL Solutions, "IPs know what to do to prevent sentinel events from spreading but it's hard to know the moment where their efforts will have the greatest impact. Waiting for the laboratory or public health agency to confirm an event is usually too late. CBSS applies syndromic surveillance to a facility's historical data and specific patient population. This helps teams intervene earlier to better protect staff and patients." With an indication of an increasing bioburden, infection teams can make specific interventions relevant to that type of communicable disease to protect its community, staff and in-patient populations.
In a survey of infection prevention professionals, RL found that all of respondents agreed that identifying early indicators is one of their biggest challenges in responding to community illnesses. As well, they all said that a tool that allows them to anticipate an increasing bioburden from the community to their facility would be valuable and beneficial to improving patient outcomes. In addition, the survey participants said that syndromic surveillance tools have historically not always proved useful at the facility level because they don't help IPs make timely decisions. However, almost all of the IPs surveyed said they would find forecasting technology "very valuable" for infection prevention and that it would be "very useful" to combine syndromic surveillance technology with historical data specific to their facility.