I read with great interest this article published in the American Journal of Infection Control on comparing infection control practices between a Dutch and U.S. hospital using the IRIS (Infection Risk Scan) method.IRIS is a mechanism to measure the quality of infection prevention and antimicrobial use in a standardized way. Sounds too good to be true.
I encourage you to read the methods carefully to get a sense of how these processes were measured. In brief, IRIS consists of cross-sectional measurements of appropriateness of medical device use, antimicrobial use, environmental contamination and hand hygiene compliance, along with other variables.
The data are summarized as improvement plots. This is where the study is most relevant.
The primary infection prevention goal to focus on improvement of modifiable risk factors to minimize all potentially preventable infections, as explored here. Clear identification of areas for improvement is the 1st step towards greater patient safety.
