Publications by authors named "Norbert Thoma"
Article Synopsis
- - During the COVID-19 pandemic, a study in Berlin identified three outbreaks of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) across five intensive care units, highlighting an increase in multidrug-resistant infections in hospitals.
- - The study employed a case-control design to determine risk factors for acquiring CRAB, analyzing data from August 2020 to March 2021, where cases were patients with hospital-acquired CRAB, and controls were matched patients without CRAB.
- - Two significant risk factors were found: sharing a room with a CRAB patient increased infection risk over tenfold, and bronchoscopy procedures raised the risk by more than six times, emphasizing the need for stringent infection control measures. *
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear: sharing and exchanging data among research institutions is crucial in order to efficiently respond to global health threats. This can be facilitated by defining health data models based on interoperability standards. In Germany, a national effort is in progress to create common data models using international healthcare IT standards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImplementation of an automated cluster alert system into the routine work of infection control and hospital epidemiology: experiences from a tertiary care university hospital.
BMC Infect Dis
October 2021
Background: Early detection of clusters of pathogens is crucial for infection prevention and control (IPC) in hospitals. Conventional manual cluster detection is usually restricted to certain areas of the hospital and multidrug resistant organisms. Automation can increase the comprehensiveness of cluster surveillance without depleting human resources.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Outbreaks of communicable diseases in hospitals need to be quickly detected in order to enable immediate control. The increasing digitalization of hospital data processing offers potential solutions for automated outbreak detection systems (AODS). Our goal was to assess a newly developed AODS.
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