Our Hospital Watch Live solution was recently featured on the Financial Post series Smart Shift. Click the image to watch “Smart Health”:

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Infection Watch Live is hard at work in southeastern Ontario, now that we’re in the third week of this second wave of Novel H1N1 Influenza A (human swine flu).

Infonaut’s online, publicly-accessible Infection Watch Live solution, implemented for KFL&A Public Health, clearly shows widespread respiratory and gastrointestinal symptom presentation in the area.

Click the image below to see live infection data for southeastern Ontario:

New strains of MRSA (Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus), of VRE (Vancomycin-resistant enterococci), C. difficile, even TB are becoming drug-resistant.  Some are now classified as XDR:  extensively drug-resistant.  Many of these “superbugs” spread fastest in what should be the most hygienic and safe of environments — hospitals.

Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) are a growing fear in the public’s mind, litigation is on the rise, and millions are spent on new cleaning protocols alone.  The average cost of hospital care for patients who acquired infections is over $180,000 (US) compared with $31,000 (US) for regular acute patients.  A single class action suit in Canada (against Ontario’s St. Joseph Brant hospital) totaled $50M, and since 2005 the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has paid £12 million to people claiming compensation involving superbugs.  Financial news sources in the US are predicting this as just the beginning of a wave of superbug-related litigation.

Yet one of the most effective strategies in combatting hospital-acquired infections (HAI) is simple contact management — tracing and understanding interactions:  between patients and staff, patients and equipment, staff and equipment.  Hospitals currently lack the means to track the spread of these outbreaks within their walls, and unable to isolate where contamination occurred and how it is spreading, time and resources are spent starting from scratch every time.

Keeping track of who touched what and what went where, done manually, can quickly add to, not alleviate the burden on overworked professionals.  However, data gathered through RFID happens automatically (no extra steps for hospital personnel); is accurate; and is available in real-time.

That’s why Infonaut Inc has created a precise RFID and GIS-based infectious disease risk-management tool, called Hospital Watch Live (HWL).

“We are very excited to be working on this project and about the potential it brings to the healthcare industry,” said Niall Wallace, CEO, Infonaut. “This innovative health IT product will help health stakeholders control the spread of infectious diseases such as C. difficile. In the future, we hope that hospitals, long-term care facilities and other health facilities will be able to use this system to help manage and reduce the impact of future number of disease outbreaks.”

When a “Patient Zero” is identified in Hospital Watch Live, GIS mapping technology combines with RFID locators to support immediate risk assessment, containment and outbreak mitigation.  RFID tag technology enables hospitals to literally see who and what infected patients have interacted with, where they have been, and which equipment has been in close proximity to them – all turned into actionable information.  An analytical extension determines potential commonalities and high-risk contacts. Profiles are dynamically generated: as people and assets interact with each other, associated risk levels change to reflect new inputs.

“We recognize the importance of supporting the development of this unique system that could help staff manage the spread of infectious diseases at SAH [Sault Area Hospital] while creating a value-added product for use throughout the healthcare sector,” said David Orazietti, MPP for Sault Ste Marie.

A Beta implementation of Hospital Watch Live will launch within the next month at the Sault Area Hospital (SAH), a provincial leader in C. difficile management.

“The Sault Area Hospital is pleased to collaborate on this innovative solution with Infonaut,” said Marc Bouchard, Chief Information and Privacy Officer, Sault Area Hospital. “The project will see the development of what should be an interesting tool that could assist our ongoing efforts in infection control and prevention.”

The next phase of development on the HWL solution includes installation and simulated use in George Brown College (GBC)’s Controlled Applied Learning Environment (CALE), Simulated Practice Centre (SPC).  George Brown’s $1.2 million advanced facility incorporates an electronic health records system, video camera broadcast system, and complex simulation mannequins.  Nursing students will use the system as part of the infection control curriculum, and other faculty and students will be involved in the testing and development of system components.

This relationship gives Infonaut a strategic advantage, as testing on hyper-real simulations that give hospitals and healthcare organizations added confidence in the robustness of Infonaut’s technology.  Robert Luke, Director of Research and Innovation at GBC said of Infonaut’s technology: “This is the kind of applied research the country needs — innovation meeting real needs.”

To learn more about this product, or the rest of the Infonaut Live suite, please contact Sandra Linklater, Director of Business Development at slinklater[at]infonaut[dot]ca or 705-987-3816.

>>Swine flu outbreak no reason to panic

It’s difficult to tell in some instances which is moving faster — the virus or the information announcing its progression. Updates arrive not hourly, but every minute, from every corner of the globe.

Here in Kingston, we can go online to www.kfla.ca and click on the infection watch live website to monitor changes in area illness activity. Green, yellow and red indicate, respectively, normal, elevated or high activity of respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses.

Full Article:  here.

>> Kingstonians appear to be taking outbreak seriously

Gemmill said that local health authorities are monitoring the new influenza strain via a 24- hour “syndromic surveillance” system that reports any unusual changes in respiratory and gastrointestinal illness activity. The public can view the system by logging onto www.kfla.ca and clicking on “infection watch live website.”

Full Article:  here.

Infonaut’s CEO Niall Wallace was interviewed this evening on BNN’s SqueezePlay. See his full interview on infection control here.

This morning’s Globe & Mail features a profile on Infonaut, and the relevance of our Infection Watch Live solution to the H1N1 outbreak:

In 1854, Dr. John Snow plotted cholera cases on a map of London, England, to find the source of a serious outbreak that was killing hundreds of people. It became apparent that the biggest clusters of the disease were near a public water pump on Broad Street, and Dr. Snow was able to stop the spread by shutting down that source.

Fast-forward one-and-a-half centuries to Toronto, where a small firm is using 21st-century software to create maps with similar goals — the containment of disease — by showing infection patterns that can be understood at a glance.

Full Article:  Charting the right course through an outbreak

Infonaut will be in Chicago at HIMSS’09 from April 4th-8th.

We will be launching our Hospital Watch Live application, and CEO Niall Wallace will be participating in a roundtable on blogging.

Come and see us and partner ESRI in Booth 3648.