In a first for hospital infection control, the UC San Francisco Health Informatics team has used electronic health records (EHRs) to track down a source of a common hospital-acquired infection by tracing the movements of more than 85,000 patients over a three-year period.A bacterium known as Clostridium difficile (colloquially called C. diff) is the leading cause of infections in health care settings, but the complex interactions and location changes that take place in hospitals often make it difficult to identify the source of these infections. UCSF is committed to reducing rates of hospital acquired C. diff.In the new study, published in the Oct. 23, 2017, issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, the UCSF Health Informatics team used time and location stamps which are entered in EHRs whenever patients undergo procedures, such as radiological scans or operations, or are moved to different parts of the hospital to map 435,000 patient location changes throughout the UCSF Medical Center at Parnassus between 2013 and 2016.

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