JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is the most widely used healthcare-associated infection (HAI) and antimicrobial use and resistance (AUR) surveillance program in the United States. Over 37,000 healthcare facilities participate in the program and submit a large volume of HAI and AUR surveillance data. These data are used by the facilities themselves, CDC, and other agencies and organizations for a variety of purposes, including infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship, and clinical quality measurement. Among the summary metrics made available by NHSN are standardized infection ratios (SIRs), which are used to identify HAI prevention needs and measure progress at the national, regional, state and local levels.

Objective:

To extend the use of geospatial methods and tools to NHSN data, and in turn to promote and inspire new uses of the rendered data for analysis and prevention purposes, we developed a web-enabled system that enables integrated visualization of HAI metrics and supporting data.

Methods:

We leveraged geocoding and visualization technologies that are readily available and in current use to develop a web-enabled system designed to support visualization and interpretation of data submitted to NHSN from geographically dispersed sites. The server-client model-based system enables users to access the application via a web-browser.

Results:

We integrated multiple datasets into a single page dashboard designed to enable users to navigate across different HAI event types, choose specific healthcare facility or geographic locations for data displays, and scale across time units within identified time periods. We launched the system for internal CDC use in January 2019.

Conclusions:

CDC NHSN statisticians, data analysts, and subject matter experts identified opportunities to extend the use of geospatial methods and tools to NHSN data and provided the impetus to develop NHSNViz. The development effort proceeded iteratively, with the developer adding or enhancing functionality and including additional data sets in a series of prototype versions, each of which incorporated user feedback. The initial production version of NHSNViz provides a new geospatial analytic resource built in accordance with CDC user requirements and extensible to additional users and uses in subsequent versions.