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A Comparison of Infection Control Software for Use by Hospital Epidemiologists in Meeting the New JCAHO Standards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2016

Sharon LaHaise
Sharon LaHaise*
Affiliation:
Department of Infection Control, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, Pomona, California
*
Department of Infection Control, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, 1798 N. Garey Avenue, Pomona, CA 91767
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Abstract

To choose a microcomputer software package for our hospital epidemiology division, the two leading commercial software packages for infection control, AICE (ICPA, Inc., Austin, Texas) and NOSO- (Epi Systematics, Inc., Ft. Meyers, Florida), were compared for the types of epidemiologic analysis likely to be required to satisfy new Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) 1990 Infection Control Standards. The test dataset was a surgical database of 3,235 operations with 292 (9%) wound infections. Though NOSO- was more flexible in terms of the amount of data items one could record, it required seven times longer to learn, nine times more disk space to store and two times as long to enter cases than AICE. Six simple infection control reports (i.e., line listings, crosstabulations, stratified rates and graphs) required only seven computing steps and approximately 11 minutes to process with AICE, but 22 steps and over two hours with NOSO-3. All analytic results from AICE agreed with the results obtained with the Statistical Analysis System (SAS, SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, North Carolina), but analyses such as service-specific rates performed with NOSO- differed because of a design flaw in the NOSO- data structure.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , April 1990 , pp. 185 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 1990

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