RiskPrincipe

From a medical point of view, nosocomial infections, i.e. infections acquired in the context of a medical procedure, are one of the greatest increasing medical burdens worldwide. In Germany, these infections are associated with an estimated 16,000 deaths per year. Preventing these infections is one of the most important issues in patient safety. In addition to the negative consequences that a nosocomial infection has for individual patients, these infections also lead to higher expenditure in the healthcare system. These infections are often treated with antibiotics, which in turn can contribute to antimicrobial resistance - especially if they are not used in a targeted manner.

A multidisciplinary approach to infection prevention is therefore required to contain nosocomial infections. Surveillance, the standardised documentation of infections and analysis, interpretation and introduction of targeted intervention measures as well as monitoring, is one of the key components of prevention in individual hospitals.

However, the current measures for surveillance and prevention of nosocomial infections are very time-consuming and labour-intensive and tend to be universal rather than individually or group-specific risk-adapted. It is therefore innovative to find the best possible combination of reducing the risk of infection and optimising the distribution of specialist resources.

RISK PRINCIPE could improve the quality of patient care and patient safety in particular by helping to identify specific groups of high-risk patients, reduce the resources required for surveillance and increase early, risk-adapted infection prevention and control.

This is to be tested using the example of hospital onset bacteraemia (HOBs). In order to achieve this goal, various data sources will be evaluated and risk profiles created, which will then be tested.

In summary, RISK PRINCIPE aims to develop and validate automated data collection for surveillance purposes and routine data-based risk prediction using the example of bloodstream infections with subsequent visualisation for more effective and efficient infection prevention and control.