Infection control within hospitals is a huge and a rapidly growing problem.In response, Medicare and private insurers are restricting payment for care of patients with HAIs. While many hospitals have made infection control a top priority, the historic challenge facing nurses, physicians, pharmacists and others charged with managing this problem has been combing through hundreds of records every day to identify trends or track individual patients.All hospitals, even small ones, contain huge amounts of data in paper and electronic records, often contained in separate departments or software applications. Here is where data mining plays a major role. Data mining is now being used to automatically monitor clinical information among these disparate data sets including pharmacy, lab, admission/discharge and medical transcripts.By applying algorithms such as, association rules, Bayesian classification and regression analysis to large data sets to identify patterns and meanings, hospitals  can spot trends that would otherwise be hidden and not available with simple reports.

[Infection Control Today]