Nosocomial infections and antimicrobial resistance are problems of enormous magnitude
that impact the morbidity and mortality of hospitalized patients as well as their
cost of care. The Data Mining Surveillance System (DMSS) uses novel data mining techniques
to discover unsuspected, useful patterns of nosocomial infections and antimicrobial
resistance from the analysis of hospital laboratory data. This report details a mature
version of DMSS as well as an experiment in which DMSS was used to analyze all inpatient
culture data, collected over 15 months at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Hospital.
Keywords
Data Mining - Surveillance - Antibiotic Resistance - Infection Control