Pilot testing standardized surveillance: Hospital Infection Standardised Surveillance (HISS). On behalf of the HISS Reference Group

In Australia the time-consuming nature of double handling of surveillance data has meant that surveillance methodology rarely included prospective monitoring of patients at risk for the acquisition of a nosocomial infection. To streamline surveillance activities, infection control professionals favored the collection of case data either from the ward or pathology laboratories. By default, this method introduced a variety of definitions resulting in inconsistencies across health care facilities and artificial fluctuations in the magnitude of infection. In June 1998, the New South Wales Health Department funded its first attempt to develop and implement a standardized approach to collection of nosocomial infection data-Hospital Infection Standardized Surveillance (HISS). Six months later, in December 1998, 10 public acute care hospitals pilot tested the content and methodology of HISS. HISS members tested the application of the National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance system definitions for infection, active and passive surveillance methodology, the handheld computer for data collection, and the Electronic Infection Control Automated Technology (eICAT) version for HISS software and analysis. HISS member hospitals selected from several sentinel monitoring programs such as intravascular device-related bacteremia and nonintravascular device-related bacteremia infections, surgical site infections, respiratory syncytial virus infections, and rotavirus infections. Hospitals continued to perform active surveillance in the first 12 months, collecting demographic variables, risk factors, and outcomes. The completeness of the data sets for the two most frequently monitored programs, surgical site infections and intravascular device-related bacteremia, was high, with 99.6% of the required 36, 372 surgical site infection data fields and 99.4% of the 572,717 intravascular device-related bacteremia data fields completed.