How to Automate ICNet

Infection prevention is a small team watching a very large building

ICNet is clinical surveillance software for infection prevention and control, published by Baxter, and it comes in two forms: a Hospital Suite for a single facility and a National Suite for surveillance across a whole country.

Inside a hospital, the Infection Prevention module handles electronic case management, alerting and reporting on the data around preventing and controlling microbial disease. Around it sit surgical site infection surveillance, ABX Steward for antimicrobial stewardship, ICNET Protect for the immunity status of the people who work there, and Outbreak Manager.

The team using it is small. Three or four infection preventionists and a stewardship pharmacist for a hospital with several hundred beds is ordinary. Their job is to notice early: a resistant organism appearing twice on the same ward, a central line that has been in too long, a surgical wound that has come back six weeks after theatre.

The line list gets built one screen at a time

Most of a preventionist's week is a list.

The morning list of new positive cultures to triage, each with an organism, a source, a unit and a bed. The line list of current healthcare-associated infections, kept current by hand. Surgical patients due for their thirty or ninety day surveillance window, tracked in a spreadsheet because that calendar runs per patient rather than per month. Device days, counted and reconciled, because the denominator decides the rate as much as the numerator does. Isolation orders that expire and need a decision. Hand hygiene audit returns chased from unit champions who have a ward to run.

Then the reporting. What ICNet has ready has to be compared against what the national system shows as actually received, and the gap closed before a monthly deadline nobody moves.

None of it is optional, and all of it competes with the reason the team exists, which is being on the wards.

ICNet

Alert organisms escalated in minutes A positive blood culture or an alert organism reaches the on-call preventionist by text rather than at the next shift handover.

Clusters found on the day they form Unit and organism combinations checked hourly against your own threshold, so an investigation starts before the weekly meeting.

Surveillance dates that surface themselves Thirty and ninety day assessments, isolation expiries and device day counts listed before any of them run late.

ICNet watches the lab, the pharmacy and the bed board at once

ICNet is genuinely good at the part it can see, and it sees a great deal.

The Infection Prevention module turns the hospital's feeds into electronic case management, alerting and reporting. ABX Steward pulls medication data, laboratory data, patient location data and selected clinical data together into targeted alerts, and reports on stewardship activity, drug utilisation and resistance patterns. Outbreak Manager sorts through surveillance data to identify clusters that may indicate an outbreak, with case definitions and analysis tools built for investigating one. The surgical site infection tools document procedures, identify potential infections and link events for analysis, and ICNET Protect tracks the immunity status of staff.

All of that runs on the feeds the hospital wired in.

What it cannot do is leave the building. It cannot open the national reporting system and check what actually landed. It cannot read the reference lab's portal for a result that never came back through an interface. It cannot ring anybody. An alert sitting on a screen at two in the morning is a message waiting for whoever opens that screen at eight.

A cluster can reach the on-call phone the hour it forms

Everything the team responds to shows up inside ICNet first, usually hours before anyone sees it.

Newly resulted positive cultures read as they land, with organism, source, unit and bed, posted to the team channel, and an alert organism or a positive blood culture escalated to the on-call preventionist by text instead of waiting for the next handover.

Unit and organism combinations checked each hour against the cluster threshold the hospital has set, so three cases of the same organism on one ward inside a week starts an investigation that day rather than at the weekly meeting. This week's surgical patients due for their thirty or ninety day assessment listed with the procedure and the due date. Isolation orders coming up for expiry raised before they lapse. Device days reconciled and the day's line and catheter position summarised for the safety huddle. Hand hygiene audit returns rolled up, so the ward that has quietly stopped submitting is obvious.

Counts ICNet has ready compared against what the national system shows as received, with the gap and the days remaining attached. Gathering, comparing and alerting run unattended. Nothing is submitted to a national reporting system, no isolation status is changed and no clinical record is edited without a qualified person doing it.

The preventionist's day belongs to the wards

The team is small and the building is not. Every hour spent copying a line list is an hour nobody is on a ward.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your infection prevention team is. It opens ICNet, reads the alerts, the line lists and the surveillance due dates, and delivers them to Teams, a text message or a sheet on the schedule you set.

It runs inside your own private environment, sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it at any point.

The workflows below are already built, and each one says what it opens.