Using electronic registries to track patients with drug-resistant bacteria may be an untapped strategy to help lower infection rates, suggest the findings of a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
For the study, researchers created a model of all inpatient healthcare facilities in the Chicago area, including 90 acute care hospitals, nine long-term acute care hospitals, 351 skilled nursing facilities and 12 ventilator-capable skilled nursing facilities.
Researchers then used a software platform to model how an electronic registry for tracking patients with carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae would affect the spread of infections.
If all 402 healthcare facilities participated in the registry, the number of new CRE carriers would decrease by 11.7 percent in three years. Even if only 25 percent of facilities used the registry, patients with CRE would drop 9.1 percent.
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