Patient Transfer Networks: The Big Picture of Multidrug-resistant Organism Transmission

Session Description: The movement of patients across healthcare facilities can serve as a means of spreading high consequence pathogens, particularly multidrug- resistant organisms (MDROs) across a region. The frequent interactions of older adults, patients with complex medical conditions, and residents of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) with healthcare facilities present many opportunities for MDRO exposure to these high-risk patients. Understanding patient movements between healthcare facilities and the infection prevention challenges that each of these facilities face is paramount to determine local and effective infection prevention interventions.

Utilizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tools such as the MDRO Regional Analytics Dashboard and electronic disease surveillance systems, local public health can identify facilities most at risk of receiving patients colonized or infected with MDROs and can pinpoint facilities that are considered influential or highly connected facilities in a particular geographic region.

In this presentation, you will hear the experiences of a coalition that was formed by a local public health department that brought together infection prevention representatives from acute care, long term acute care and skilled nursing facilities to work towards MDRO management in a highly interconnected regional network. The coalition aimed to remove the silos that each of these facilities operated in by working to improve inter-facility communication and offer an open forum where ideas and infection prevention challenges could be discussed. The creation of the coalition was a foundational step in developing a long-term regional MDRO prevention plan, as specified in the CDC "Public Health Strategies to Prevent the Spread of Novel and Targeted Multidrug-Resistant Organisms" document. An additional benefit of this coalition was the opportunity for infection prevention capacity building and mentorship amongst the representatives in the coalition with the diverse level of infection prevention expertise, experience and skills of its members.