Issue



Infection inspection invention


06/01/2005







BIRMINGHAM, ALA.— Medical IT company MedMined Inc. (www.medmined.com) has introduced the Nosocomial Infection Marker (NIM) to its Data Mining Surveillance technology. The company claims that infection-control professionals can now take accurate, electronic, facility-wide measurement of incidences of hospital-acquired infections. Due to resource limitations, many hospitals use manual "targeted" surveillance methods, hindering the ability to track infections throughout their facilities. The NIM technology, however, is an electronic market that uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze existing microbiology lab and patient census data to identify entire hospital-acquired infections. "Because the NIM is objective, consistent and can be tied to financial data, infectioncontrol professionals are armed with surveillance data meaningful to both clinicians and hospital executives," says Dr. Patrick Hymel, MedMined"s chief medical officer. III