Traditional and ICT Solutions for Preventing the Hospital Acquired Infection

The Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI), also known as nosocomial infection is an infection acquired by the patient during his stay in the health care facilities due to a completely different reason than the original entry reason. The HAI problem is classified as one of the main problems in health care facilities nowadays, due to the increased mortality, prolonging the duration of stay in hospitals, and then increased financial burden. In this article we highlight the infection problem with clear statistics from many countries, the infection causes in details, especially the contaminated hands, which are a critical issue. We clarify the role of healthcare workers (HCWs) and the hospital management for infection prevention. The aim of our research is to propose an information system dedicated to the prevention of hospital acquired infections. This paper presents an analysis of both the traditional and the latest ICT solutions dedicated to HAI prevention. The paper reveals that the traditional methods are far from enough to solve the problem, and that ICT solutions could contribute to solve the HAI problem to a much larger extent. In particular, we analyzed the integrated ICT systems used for monitoring the compliance with hand hygiene in details, and found that they give the highest rate of compliance with hand hygiene, thus fighting an important rate of infection.