Title: Preventing Hospital Acquired Infections Through a Workflow-Based Cyber-Physical System,
Abstract: Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are infections acquired within the
hospital from healthcare workers, patients or from the environment, but which
have no connection to the initial reason for the patient's hospital admission.
HAI are a serious world-wide problem, leading to an increase in mortality
rates, duration of hospitalisation as well as significant economic burden on
hospitals. Although clear preventive guidelines exist, studies show that
compliance to them is frequently poor. This paper details the software
perspective for an innovative, business process software based cyber-physical
system that will be implemented as part of a European Union-funded research
project. The system is composed of a network of sensors mounted in different
sites around the hospital, a series of wearables used by the healthcare workers
and a server side workflow engine. For better understanding, we describe the
system through the lens of a single, simple clinical workflow that is
responsible for a significant portion of all hospital infections. The goal is
that when completed, the system will be configurable in the sense of
facilitating the creation and automated monitoring of those clinical workflows
that when combined, account for over 90\% of hospital infections.