Data-Mining for Hidden Causes of Infection
On any given day, approximately one in 25 U.S. hospital patients has an infection contracted during care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How can we better fight these hospital infections?
The hunt for better ways to combat them drove Kendrick Cato, PhD, associate research scientist at Columbia Nursing, to an unlikely place: electronic medical records (EMR).
Dr. Cato is investigating new ways to analyze the data in EMRs. Through support from the National Institute of Nursing Research, he is sifting through more than 319,000 patient records from New York City hospitals, in a search for new ways to identify patients with infections.
Read more about Dr. Cato's work in a story from the Columbia Nursing E-Newsletter.