Apollo Hospitals uses Data Analytics to Control Hospital Acquired Infections

Asia’s largest healthcare group Apollo Hospitals is living up to the adage of obviation is better than cure. Each hospital in the Apollo Hospital Group has a robust infection prevention and control program.

As Asia’s largest healthcare group, its presence includes 9,554 beds across 69 Hospitals, 2,326 Pharmacies, over 172 Primary Care and Diagnostic Clinics, 148 plus Telemedicine Centres, and 80 plus Apollo Munich Indemnification branches spanning the length and breadth of the country.

But the prevalence of Hospital Acquired Infections was a solemn threat to the hospital. “Most of the patients who come to the hospital for treatment, have an impotent immune system. HAI (Hospital Acquired Infection) or nosocomial infection — a disease contracted by a patient while under medical care — is one of the most astronomically immense challenges faced by hospitals, especially in critical care units.

According to Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Apollo Hospitals Group, “Once a patient is infected, treatment becomes difficult because the infection often mutates in a hospital environment and become multi-drug resistant. HAI directly or indirectly leads to the deterioration of the health of a patient and put a greater financial burden on him in addition to increased length of stay.

Tracking Infection Control Data

Each of the hospitals in the Apollo Hospitals group tracks infection control parameters month after month and these are benchmarked with standards and variations and the values are exhaustively analyzed. The publishing of infection rates designates an ecosystem of transparency, meticulous capture of infection cognate data, an exhaustive audit, and analysis, with intent to amend.

Apollo has implemented data analytics for presaging infection risks for better infection control. It’s entire data in terms of the antibiotics, microbial systems, microbiology tests that go along with it and the diagnosis pattern of diseases has been analyzed for soothsaying and prescribing patterns to visually examine how to obviate and control hospital-acquired infections. “Hospital-acquired infections are always jeopardy from a tertiary care patient perspective and keeping that proximate to zero is an absolute delight for clinical outcomes. Tertiary care patients are already arduous in clinical patients. So, ascertaining that we have the least quantity of intricacy from other sources ascertains that the treatment gets good clinical outcomes. Being a tertiary hospital, this is very important for us,” explains Sivaramakrishnan.

Apollo Hospitals in India tackled the problem of ‘Hospital Acquired Infection’ using an analytics model.

The analytics solution takes the clinical information cognate to the communication of disease and infection surveillance patterns and collaborates it with the microbiology information, the laboratory information, and the antibiotic information. This is utilized as a multi-dimension analytics engine that consumes sizably voluminous data and in turn, shows it in a graphical manner. Some could be the heat maps, and some could be the surveillance patterns so that the clinicians can utilize it in a slice and dice manner in an analytics pattern. They can collaborate that pattern with the required patient information to ascertain the applicability of suchlike infection potentials on their treatment plan.

According to Sivaramakrishna, “Now that the information was available, doctors can understand that there is a possibility of the infection affecting a patient. And that decision engine is presented in a manner that the doctors and clinical teams can consume it to make clinical judgment”. But that was more facile verbally expressed than done. Understanding the whole process correctly was critical because this was an advanced clinical activity. This is where the clinicians came to the rescue of the IT team. There were mendacious positives in the early part of the project but with some avail from clinicians, the quandary was resolved.

By ascertaining tight clinical collaboration with the efficacious utilization of technology Apollo Hospitals has been able to ascertain that HAI can be kept to the minimum level and the length of hospital stay is thereby minimized. This avail truncates the cost to the patient and the entire healthcare process.