Each year, International Infection Prevention Week recognizes the professionals working behind the scenes and at the bedside to protect patients, health care workers and communities from infection.
This year's theme, "Past. Presented. Protected." reflects how generations of knowledge, science and vigilance have shaped infection prevention. From hand hygiene and vaccination to surveillance and modern clinical technologies, the tools may have evolved, but identifying risks early and taking action to keep people safe is the priority.
For infection prevention professionals across the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), that mission requires the ability to recognize potential threats across complex health care environments while managing enormous amounts of clinical information.
Technology that puts the right information in front of the right people at the right time can help.
Infection prevention depends heavily on visibility. When important patient information is spread across different systems or surveillance relies on manual processes, identifying a potential infection risk can take valuable time.
DSS TheraDoc helps address that challenge by aggregating patient data in real time and providing targeted clinical surveillance for infection prevention, infectious disease, antimicrobial stewardship and other areas of care.
The solution monitors changing patient information and can alert clinical teams when intervention may be required. This can be particularly important when dealing with communicate infections, where early identification can help teams respond before an infection has an opportunity to spread more broadly.
Rather than requiring clinicians to search through multiple systems for relevant information, TheraDoc brings data together in an accessible view and stratifies as events, lab results and patient conditions change.
International Infection Prevention Week is also an opportunity to recognize the people responsible for turning that information into action.
Infection prevention professionals continually monitor patient populations, investigate potential infections, document interventions, and collaborate with clinicians across the organization.
TheraDoc provides customizable surveillance and workflow tools that can help teams manage those responsibilities in a more standardize and repeatable way.
Teams can track pending and completed activities; document follow up and maintain greater visibility into patients who may require attention. TheraDoc also supports clinical pharmacy and antimicrobial stewardship teams, helping pharmacists monitor laboratory data and identify patients who may be candidates for changes in antimicrobial therapy.
That shared visibility can help infection preventionists, pharmacists and other clinicians work from the same information as they make decisions about patient care.
TheraDoc has supported VA clinical teams for more than a decade and is currently used at more than 60 VA Medical Centers.
Its integration with VistA and CPRS enables real-time access to clinical information while supporting existing VA workflows. TheraDoc also includes capabilities designed specifically around health care associated infections and infectious disease surveillance.
The TheraDoc Medical Device Interface extends those capabilities by helping teams track device insertions and removals, associate device presence with health care associated infections and calculate device days for reporting.
Together, these capabilities give VA infection prevention teams greater visibility into potential risks while supporting the consistent processes and early detection that are central to patient safety and high reliability care.
The history of infection prevention is one of continually learning how to identify risks earlier, respond more effectively and better protect patients and health care workers. Technology is now an important part of that evolution.
For VA infection prevention professionals, real-time surveillance can help transform large volumes of clinical data into information they can act on. By helping teams identify potential risks, coordinate interventions and maintain visibility across patient populations, TheraDoc supports the people working every day to protect the health of our nation's Veterans.
During International Infection Prevention Week, DSS recognizes those professionals and their ongoing commitment to making health care safer.
Contact DSS today to learn more about TheraDoc can support infection prevention professionals and clinical teams working to protect Veterans from infection. Subscribe to our blog page to stay informed of the stores that matter to you.