AI and social media against healthcare associated infections

One of the biggest issues in hospitals around the world are healthcare associated infections (HAI) – in other words, when people who enter the hospital to receive care for one disease end up infected with another one. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, a lot of people who were hospitalised for other reasons, ended up being infected with the corona virus while at the hospital.

At the same time, the world is full of healthcare workers with innovative ideas that could provide solutions to the issue with healthcare associated infections. This is why a group of researchers at Halmstad University, in collaboration with health and hygiene company Essity, are examining whether automatic idea detection (AID) can help detect good ideas that can prevent or control HAIs.

A fifth of all hospital beds filled with HAI patients

The project “Automatic idea detection: Implementing artificial intelligence in medical technology innovation” is being led by Fábio Gama, Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Innovation at Halmstad University, who is collaborating with, among others, Håkan Lindström, Global Technical Innovation Manager at Essity.

“In the Western world, around 5–15% of all patients become infected with HAIs. For many, this involves fever, nausea and a prolonged hospital stay, but for the most vulnerable patients, a HAI can have considerably more serious consequences. Healthcare associated infections can also have a big impact on the national economy – a recently published study from England shows that up to 20% of all hospital beds are filled with patients with HAIs”, says Håkan Lindström.

Hand hygiene needs improvement

“Many companies and hospitals are understandably very concerned about this – they can close entire departments if there is an infection going around”, says Fábio Gama, who has a background in engineering and product development of medical devices.

Fábio Gama continues: “One of the ways to mitigate this issue is with better hand hygiene. The compliance with hand hygiene recommendations is not substantial enough. It’s very interesting because we know that people know what to do, but for different reasons, there are times when the protocols are not being followed. It could for example be due to work overload, or simply forgetting.”

“This is a systematic error where no individual is to blame. But there is need for improvement, nonetheless. That is why we and other companies are looking for ways to help the healthcare sector to get even better”, says Håkan Lindström.

Finding the needle in the haystack using AI

“Our starting point is pretty humble”, Håkan Lindström continues. “The world is full of clever people with clever ideas, and rather than reinventing the wheel, we wanted to focus on finding ideas that already exist. There are plenty of nurses in the world, for example, and chances are that they are sharing their clever ideas – we just haven’t been able to hear about them.”

“This is where artificial intelligence comes into the picture”, says Fábio Gama. “In this project, we have turned to social media to see what healthcare workers around the world are trying to do and communicate – and if maybe they are using some new methods to control or prevent HAIs. With AI, we can find the needle in the haystack.”

Fábio Gama explains that a way to detect innovative healthcare practices is to screen online platforms to identify new solutions. Artificial intelligent models can screen vast amounts of information and automatically detect user‐contributed ideas – this system is called automatic idea detection (AID).

“For this study, we have chosen to focus on Twitter and tweets in English, but the model can just as well be used on other platforms and for many other types of problems and languages”, says Mahmoud Rahat, Associate Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing, who is supervising the development of the new AI model used in the project.