By Chris Guerrero, Director of Public Health Services

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) and KONZA were selected to present “MDRO RapidAlerts Pilot: Utilizing State Health Information Exchange for Automated, Real-Time MDRO Admission Alerts” at the annual Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) conference, held June 10-13 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The CSTE Annual Conference brings together over 2,500 public health epidemiologists to exchange expertise in surveillance, epidemiology and best practices across various public health domains, including informatics, infectious diseases, substance use, immunizations, environmental health, occupational health, chronic disease, injury control and maternal and child health.

Presenters included:

• Justin Blanding, MPH – KDHE Senior Epidemiologist
• Bryna N. Stacey, MPH, BSN, RN, CIC – KDHE Section Director, Healthcare-Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance Section
• Carrie A. Welch, BS – KDHE Infection Preventionist & MDRO Lab/Epi Coordinator
• Chris Guerrero, MPA, PMP – Director of Public Health Services, KONZA National Network

The presentation highlighted the critical need for timely interfacility notifications of patients with MDRO histories to implement transmission-based precautions during inpatient visits. The current manual process is labor-intensive. To address this, KDHE collaborated with KONZA National Network to develop an automated, real-time MDRO alerting system using KONZA’s product, RapidAlerts Direct, data from the state HIE, Kansas Health Information Network(KHIN) and KDHE’s EpiTrax disease surveillance system.

There are approximately 370 patients on the KDHE MDRO list, with most patients having a history of carbapenemase-producing Acinetobacter baumannii infection or colonization. From October 2023 to March 2024, one of five facilities received three real-time MDRO alerts. On average, it took 1.5 hours for infection prevention teams to receive alerts in their EHR systems after patient admission. This rapid alert system ensures that infection prevention staff are promptly notified, eliminating the need for manual lookups.

RapidAlerts Direct has demonstrated success in providing real-time MDRO alerts during patient admissions and transfers to infection prevention and care teams. By leveraging KONZA’s health information exchange ADT data and integrating it into a health system’s EHR, infection prevention staff are immediately notified, eliminating the need for a separate system or manual patient lookups. As a result, facilities were able to place patients in contact precautions in less than two hours of admission. These alerts identified MDRO statuses that facilities might not have known without this pilot system.

The next phase of the pilot involves onboarding long-term care facilities, expanding to additional facilities and automating MDRO patient list submissions to KHIN.