Value of infection control software highlighted

Infection control software is a worthwhile investment for trusts, but care must be taken in staff training, configuration and connecting the systems to existing laboratory software, says a report into the experiences of nine trusts by the Health Protection Agency.

The three month pilot, which involved three software companies, EpiQuest, ICNet and ICE, across 11 sites in nine unnamed hospital trusts in the south-west, started in January 2005.

The principal problems came from getting the infection control software to interface with each trust’s laboratory information system: "Our experience from this limited number of installations is that this created more work than any of the trusts anticipated and that getting systems installed and working correctly was much more difficult and more time-consuming for laboratory and IT staff than expected."

Infection control software allows trusts to keep track and record instances of infection for clinical and administrative purposes. The systems provide an electronic database that allows historical records to be built up, eliminating the need for paper archives and making queries more efficient.

The HPA report said that software to support infection control should also be able to output standardised reports that help clinicians predict how serious an outbreak is, as well as where and whether any subsequent infections are going to occur. Interfacing with laboratory information management systems (LIMS) is also key, and the report recommends that trusts should check how compatible any systems they may implement are with them.

"Configuration and interfacing caused the main problems for a variety of reasons," said the report, adding that lack of staff time, communication issues between the trusts and companies, lack of PAS links and "problems getting the systems to ‘talk’ to each other" caused delays.

Hardware needed to be upgraded in five out of the nine trusts, with a loan for a new server for the systems to run on but no need for new PCs.

Katie Belton, director of ICNet, one of the companies involved in the pilot, told E-Health Insider that the company also learnt lessons from the schemes, such as new features: "The ICNet product is continually being worked on and improved, thus the main lessons learnt from the trials were suggestions of enhancements such as timeline reports for outbreak management."

Belton added that the pilot was also commercially successful for the company: "We got a number of English reference sites installed quickly and this in turn has led to the widespread adoption of ICNet throughout the UK. Significantly, Plymouth Hospital NHS Trust, which was heavily involved in part one of the ASEPTIC evaluation, has chosen ICNet after a recent tender."

The report added that the National Programme for IT is expected to have a large impact on hospital information systems, and that this needed to be taken into account. An important need for infection control systems is compliance with the electronic Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), and the HPA’s report recommends that any trusts intending to implement them ought to review their e-GIF compliance. Future software systems that use e-GIF will have greater flexibility and communications, it added.