Data-Driven Insights into Healthcare Challenges: Two Case Studies

Abstract

In this seminar, I will present two data-driven healthcare projects. The first project aims to calculate the burden of healthcare-acquired infections in Australia. We conducted a point prevalence survey for five such infections in 2018 and compared their burden with that of more recognized conditions requiring hospitalization. We found that these largely preventable conditions lead to almost 7,000 deaths annually, highlighting the need for significant improvement in healthcare practices.The second project focuses on understanding the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Victorian hospitals. Using linked data from the Victorian State Government, we analyzed patient movement across the healthcare network to design surveillance and control strategies in case of an outbreak. With 8 million hospital admissions per year, it would be ideal to test strategies on a small subset of this network. However, it is unclear whether AMR-infected patients move around the network in the same way as non-infected patients. To address this, we used patient matching and survival analysis and found that AMR-infected patients move around the network to the same number of places as AMR-negative patients, but at a faster pace. This highlights the critical need for timely control strategies to contain the outbreak.