Big Ideas: A Data-Driven Innovation Competition
Dr. Jonas Marschall pitching H-AI-HAI to judges on May 14, 2024.
A Patient Safety Technology Award, provided by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative as part of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, was awarded at the Big Ideas Competition held at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis May 24.
Presented by the Healthcare Innovation Lab and the Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics (I2DB), the competition aims to support novel and innovative projects that are clinically relevant, technically feasible, and operationally sustainable. Annually, the program provides an opportunity for collaborative clinical, operational and research teams to develop innovations in informatics and healthcare delivery.
The winning team known as H-AI-HAI, or Harnessing artificial intelligence for the transition to automated healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance, took home the grand prize of $50,000 in grant funding to carry forward their novel, clinically relevant, technically feasible and operationally sustainable project. The team also received the $10,000 bonus Patient Safety Technology Award provided by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative as part of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge.
Team members include:
Principal Investigator Dr. Jonas Marschall, infectious disease physician with Washington University School of Medicine who serves as the Medical Director, Infection Prevention & Epidemiology Consortium, for BJC Healthcare
Andrew Atkinson, PhD, is a senior biomedical statistician who is Assistant Professor with the Division of Infectious Diseases. He holds a secondary appointment with the Institute for Informatics.
Jordan Shapiro, MPH, is the Director of Analytics for the Center of Clinical Excellence at BJC Healthcare.
Lan Luong, MPH, is the Senior Performance Research Analyst at BJC Healthcare
David Warren is Professor of Medicine with the WUSM ID Division and provides physician supervision for the BJH infection prevention program in his role as Hospital Epidemiologist for Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
Carole Leone, RN CIC is the IP Manager Surveillance
Megan Dethloff, RN CIC, is the BJC System Director of Infection Prevention
Hilary Babcock, MD MPH, is the Chief Quality Officer for BJC Healthcare.
The AI Dr. Marschall and his team pitched has the potential to transform in-hospital surveillance of HAIs by using advanced analytics based on the wealth of available clinical information to reduce surveillance process costs. As a result, infection prevention teams could shift their focus from measuring HAIs to infection prevention interventions needed to keep patients safe.
Dr. Marschall explains, “to understand where a healthcare organization stands in terms of healthcare-associated infections (HAI), we need to measure them. However, measuring infections by going through individual patient charts, one by one, is a tremendous work and takes time away from being on the floors for educating teams, auditing practice, and coming up with interventions to improve patient safety. With the advent of more potent machine learning methods, we believe HAI surveillance should be made as automated as possible.”
The next step for the team includes submitting internal review board (IRB) applications in June 2024. The team plans to present their project at both national and international conferences on infection disease and infection prevention and hope to publish their findings in an open access journal.