Plea for Use of Intelligent Information and Communication Technologies in Infection Surveillance and Benchmarking by Healthcare Institutions

Top healthcare and medicine depends on the implementation of best practice methods, which include surveillance of and benchmarking with defined quality indicators. Using healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance as an example, we put forward arguments in favour of automated intelligent information and communication technologies. Assessment studies with our fully automated detection and monitoring system for HAIs not only revealed much higher precision of surveillance results and much less time investment compared with conventional surveillance, but also a potential emerged for amendments and adaptations regarding new input categories or new surveillance outputs desired by clinicians, administrators, and health authorities. In this way, intelligent information and communication technologies are becoming indispensable in building affordable “safety nets” for quality assurance and benchmarking, based on fully automated and intelligent data and knowledge management. These in turn form the backbone of high-level healthcare, patient safety, and error prevention.