Hospitals are places of healing, but sometimes when patients are admitted, they catch infections known as "hospital-acquired" or "healthcare-associated" infections. 

It's always better to prevent an outbreak in a hospital than scramble to treat an infection. That's why two professors at Pitt's med school wanted to find a way to monitor for outbreaks. They developed a system that they believe is the first of its kind at any hospital in the nation.

Every hospital has outbreaks of infections, such as MRSA – a type of staph bacteria infection that's resistant to antibiotics.

"Some of these are very, very serious, like bloodstream infections, pneumonia, urinary tract infection," says Dr. Lee Harrison, a professor of epidemiology at the Division of Infectious Diseases of Pitt's School of Medicine and a medical doctor. Those infections can be deadly to patients who are already battling serious health conditions.

"They're very hard to treat, difficult to treat, infections that antibiotics typically don't work on," says Dr. Alex Sundermann, an assistant professor also in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Pitt and a PhD in public health. "These are the pathogens we're interested in stopping."

And when trying to prevent outbreaks, it's important to know where they're coming from. At UPMC Presbyterian, that's where EDS-HAT comes in.

"EDS-HAT improves patient safety," says Dr. Harrison.

Pronounced like it's spelled, EDS-HAT is not an actual hat. It stands for "Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission."

"So if you're in the hospital for a few days or more, and you get an infection, we go to the laboratory, get those bacteria, and we sequence them," Dr. Harrison says. "And that turns on the light in the hospital."

Dr. Harrison and Dr. Sundermann developed the platform and recently published the results of a two-year study of implementing EDS-HAT at UPMC Presby, in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. 

"You detect these outbreaks, you figure out what's causing them, and then we stop them in their tracks," says Dr. Harrison.

Using genomic sequencing, data mining, and machine learning, EDS-HAT quickly identifies whether patients' infections share similarities that indicate they may originate from the same source. Before, an outbreak may have gone unnoticed in situations like when multiple patients in unrelated units were getting infections.

"These ten patients were on eight different nursing units, so nobody identified the outbreak," says Dr. Harrison. "The sequencing, the genomic surveillance did that, and then we determined that there were procedures being done in interventional radiology that were causing the outbreak."

The source was tracked down and stopped.

The professors say the fact that the system is detecting these outbreaks at UPMC Presby is a good thing. "We get reports of new outbreaks every week, and we investigate the new outbreaks every week," says Dr. Harrison.

"Here at UPMC Presbyterian, we are actively looking, and we're finding them, and we're stopping them, which is unique to any other hospital in the U.S.," says Dr. Sundermann.

During the course of the two year study, EDS-HAT prevented 62 infections and five deaths at UPMC Presby.

"It's been amazing," says Dr. Harrison. "It's just like walking into a room and turning on the light. Using old methods, we don't see all these outbreaks, but you do the sequencing and all of a sudden these outbreaks become totally apparent."

The professors say along with preventing infections and protecting patients at UPMC Presby, they have a lot of things they want to try with EDS-HAT.

"We are starting to expand toward COVID and RSV and influenza, to see if we should include those respiratory viruses in EDS-HAT as well," says Dr. Harrison.

"Will this work in a children's hospital?" Dr. Sundermann says of the next steps to testing EDS-HAT. "Will it work in a community hospital or a rural hospital or a skilled nursing facility? These are all the other questions that remain on the table, and we truly think so. Yes, you know, yes, it will work there."

The study was supported with a grant from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases – one of the agencies under the National Institutes of Health that's been hit with massive federal funding cuts impacting scientific research across the country. But these disease detectives at Pitt say their role is to keep doing the science and keep finding the evidence to protect their patients.

"We know that we are getting the best care to our patients," says Dr. Sundermann. "We're preventing these infections, we're saving lives, and we're going to keep pushing that forward, however it may be able to get expanded."