Not in Kansas Anymore: Informatics Is the Future of Infection Prevention

Session Description: The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) competency model for Infection Preventionists includes informatics as one of six main domains of practice. Historically, Infection Preventionists have manually performed daily tasks which can be time consuming. However, informatics, surveillance technologies and computer automation allow many of these tasks to be completed more efficiently, allowing Infection Preventionists to focus on other priorities.

The ability for the practicing Infection Preventionist to gain knowledge in this domain area can be difficult, but worth the time investment. This session will focus on the partnership between Infection Prevention and Data Analytics teams. Focused bi-weekly meetings allowed for facilitated hands-on learning of structured query language (SQL), Microsoft Power BI, and R. Use-cases will be discussed, including the application of learning SQL to create an automated daily report to help ensure patient rooms requiring enhanced environmental cleaning occurs.

This presentation will explore the various strategies used to learn the necessary informatics and data science topics to begin managing data and automating time-consuming daily operations. This session is appropriate for Infection Preventionists at all career stages.