A study, published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, compared automated surveillance and manual surveillance for ventilator-associated events.
Researchers conducted a retrospective review of both types of surveillance for VAEs.
The automated process included ventilated patients using a secure informatics platform to identify VAEs, such as ventilator-associated condition, infection-related ventilator-associated complication and possible ventilator-associated pneumonia. The manual process involved surveillance by infection control staff. Senior infection control staff adjudicated manual surveillance-automated surveillance discordance.
There were two patient cohorts: the development cohort with 479 ventilated patients, 2,539 ventilator days and 47 VAEs; and the validation cohort with 431 ventilated patients, 2,604 ventilator days and 56 VAEs.
The study shows that manual surveillance is vulnerable to human error, while automated surveillance is more accurate and more efficient for identifying VAEs. Manual surveillance detection errors included missed detections, misclassifications and false detections.
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