Infectious Disease

Staff at UW Health and the University of Wisconsin Health Innovation Program have developed an algorithm that can be used to improve the equity of the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations to healthcare personnel during Phase 1a of the CDC’s vaccine distribution plan, if not enough vaccine is available to immunize an entire group of employees with similar job-related risk exposure. The COVID-19 Vaccine Prioritization Tool ranks health care personnel with similar job-related risk exposure by risk of mortality to COVID-19 according to SVI and age.

This tool is intended for healthcare administrators, policymakers, and researchers interested in equitably distributing vaccinations to healthcare personnel.

We are pleased to announce the pilot launch of the UW ICTR Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program (NHP).

Finding timely and accurate local health data – health information at the sub-county level - is a challenge we all face when prioritizing, scoping, implementing and evaluating health and health equity work. Health information is often only available at the county level or higher. Neighborhoods within counties are heterogeneous, and sub-county data can offer insight into patterns of health inequities and help identify local factors that can promote health and well-being.

Health Innovation Program partnered with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR), and the ICTR Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program to feature three posters at the Wisconsin Public Health Association Virtual Public Health Conference. Check out more information about each poster below:

With the onset of COVID-19, the Health Innovation Program (HIP) determined they could use the reporting infrastructure they have been developing over the last several years, in partnership with Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), to rapidly produce reports with reliable and accurate data for health systems who are WCHQ members. These reports can help the health systems to prepare for and respond to this pandemic.

The reports provide details on primary care provider panels, clinics, and ZIP codes for each health system and helps the health system to identify the numbers and prevalence of people who are at risk for severe complications from COVID-19.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, UW-Madison researchers within the School of Medicine and Public Health are quickly adapting to support Wisconsin health officials. Researchers at the Health Innovation Program (HIP), who have been working to improve health care using electronic health record data voluntarily provided by over 20 Wisconsin health systems through the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), have mobilized to determine how they could rapidly use these data to help those on the front line of the battle against COVID-19 to support the direction of efforts towards the places in Wisconsin that need it most.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, critically ill patients have been hospitalized and isolated from their families and loved ones. In many hospitals, the palliative care team has been charged with maintaining communication between the critical care team and their patients’ families. Dr. Gretchen Schwarze and her team along with Dr. Toby Campbell created the Best Case/Worst Case: ICU (COVID-19) communication toolkit to assist separated families and to help them develop an understanding of their loved one’s illness, prognostic awareness and the range of possible outcomes.

Predictive analytics has the potential to transform the health care system by using existing data to predict and prevent poor clinical outcomes, provide targeted care, and lower costs. A challenge for health systems is selecting and implementing predictive models within clinical and operational workflows.

To guide health systems through the process of selecting and implementing a predictive model within their system, the UW Health Applied Data Science team and the Health Innovation Program developed a toolkit to support planning for and implementation of a predictive model. This toolkit was tested through the implementation of a sepsis prediction model in the inpatient setting at UW Health, a large Midwestern academic health system with four hospitals.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are an issue of public health importance, as approximately 722,000 people are afflicted by an HAI every year (1 in 25 hospitalized patients) and 75,000 people with HAIs die. Daily bathing treatments with chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) for hospitalized patients is one evidence-based intervention targeting HAIs. However, it is often challenging to implement these daily bathing treatments widely across an organization.

HIP Investigators Meghan Brennan, MD and Heidi Brown, MD were recently awarded pilot funding through the University of Wisconsin - Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW ICTR).  

Nasia Safdar has been awarded a contract from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to improve research on the prevention and treatment of healthcare-associated infections (HAI). Dr. Safdar’s project creates a sustainable panel of older rural Wisconsin patients and their families, and other stakeholders including UW Health Infection Prevention staff and the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. To achieve this goal, Dr. Safdar and Researcher Mary Jo Knobloch will collaborate with Dr.