Key points
- First funded in 2015.
- Conducts research to find better ways to protect patients and healthcare workers from infection.
Overview
The Iowa Prevention Epicenter conducts research to find better ways to protect patients and healthcare workers from infection. Projects range from basic research to community implementation and involve diverse healthcare settings, including academic medical centers, a Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center, acute care hospitals, and quick and urgent care centers (UCC). Projects also involve surgical patients, patients discharged from hospitals, personal protective equipment and healthcare personnel (HCP) exposed to viral respiratory germs.
The Epicenter's long-term objectives are to:
- Improve:
- Integration of infection prevention measures into HCP's patient care processes.
- Personal protective equipment design and use to decrease HCP contamination and transmission.
- Surveillance of healthcare-associated infections.
- Antibiotic use and decrease antimicrobial resistance.
- Identify practical ways to decrease the spread of viral germs.
- Prevent hospital-onset sepsis and healthcare-associated infections, including surgical site infections.
Core research study areas
- Preventing healthcare personnel (HCP) contamination.
- Understanding and decreasing transmission of germs, such as COVID-19.
- Extending antimicrobial stewardship.
- Decreasing antimicrobial-resistant infections.
- Exploring sepsis epidemiology and prevention.
- Quantifying and decreasing environmental contamination.
- Implementing a decolonization program to obtain source control and decrease surgical site infections.
- Applying innovative research methodology.
- Training the next generation of healthcare epidemiologists.
These research goals are met by:
- Using new phone technology to expand infection surveillance in asymptomatic patients after hospital discharge.
- Identifying ways to prevent infections and infections that can lead to sepsis in hospitalized patients.
- Improving antibiotic prescribing in urgent care clinics.
- Improving antibiotic prescribing for patients at the time of discharge from the hospital.
- Reducing contamination between healthcare providers' personal protective equipment and medical equipment they use.
Research projects include:
- Patient Care Processes and Infection Prevention: An Innovative Mixed-Method Approach to Minding Our Knowledge and Practice Gaps.
- M-Health Surveillance for Healthcare-Associated Infections Following Hospital Discharge.
- Leveraging Novel Metrics to Improve Antibiotic-Prescribing in Urgent Care.
- Risk Factors and Preventability of Hospital-Onset Sepsis.
Multicenter collaborative research projects
- Creation of geospatial antibiograms to guide antimicrobial therapy and improve tracking of resistance distributions in outpatient settings.
- Improving post-discharge antimicrobial use: a cluster-randomized trial.
- Intranasal povidone iodine to prevent Staphylococcus aureus surgical site infections after orthopedic trauma surgery: the POTENT study.