University of Pittsburgh Scientists Develop Infectious Disease Detection Platform That Prevented Infections and Deaths

An infectious diseases detection platform developed by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh successfully aided in stopping outbreaks, saving lives, and cutting costs over the course of a two-year trial. UPMC has the news.

The Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission (EDS-HAT) “takes advantage of increasingly affordable genomic sequencing to analyze infectious disease samples from patients. When the sequencing detects that any two or more patients have near-identical strains of an infection, it flags the results for the hospital’s infection prevention team to find the commonality and stop the transmission.”

Genomic sequencing allows infection preventionists to know if infections between any two hospital patients happened coincidentally or from one patient infecting another. Without it, “patients with the same type of infection who don’t have an obvious link – such as staying in the same inpatient unit – may unknowingly spread the infection, leading to an outbreak growing significantly before it is detected.”

EDS-HAT ultimately “prevented 62 infections and five deaths” over the two-year period studied. It also “netted a savings of $700,000 in infection treatment costs.” Lead author Alexander Sundermann said that the technology “could easily be scaled” for implementation in hospitals across the country.