الفهرس 
AcknowledgmentOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Nosocomial infections are a major source of morbidity and mortality. The cost of which puts a huge burden on any healthcare institute. The good news is that such consequences can be substantially decreased if a sound infection control practice is implemented. The clinical microbiology laboratory is the core of any infection control practice. The sole product of any laboratory is information in the form of results data. So proper handling of laboratory data is a cornerstone in infection control practice. Manual methods of data handling can no longer provide infection control teams with sound surveillance or epidemiological data. So the need for new computerized methods and the recognition of the benefits of information technology gave rise to a new discipline that is known as medical informatics which is the field concerned with the management and use of information in health and biomedicine. So in the field of microbiology it’s only fair to say that we are living the era of clinical microbiology informatics. Technological change, like a tidal wave swamping a low-lying coastal area, has flooded the laboratory marketplace with innovative equipment, ground-breaking assays, and progressive ways of managing information. The new paradigm has been impossible to ignore. Laboratories have been forced to either get on board or get out of the way. In our study we have developed a novel laboratory information system (LIS) that we installed in our MDICU laboratory and it has managed to take on the process of infection control surveillance in the laboratory (something that is now known as virtual surveillance) successfully to the extent of completely replacing the old paper-based manual system. We called this system “MDICU Manager” and it is user “microbiologist” friendly with all members of the workforce in MDICU actively using it on daily basis to handle all aspects of microbiological procedures carried out in the laboratory. This study revealed the following results: We found out that this novel ASOD system is very accurate (with a sensitivity and specificity of 100%) and economic in running as it doesn’t require any additional procedures to be performed other than the routine investigations carried out in the MDICU laboratory. Also we used another algorithm that we called the Automated Antibiotic Efficacy Assay (AAEA) system that is designed to automatically present tables with antibiotics sorted according to their efficacy percentage for various hospitals over different periods of time. It’s a powerful tool for formulating a sound antibiotic policy for any given hospital. And after analysis of our data we concluded that given abundant data over a relatively long period of time (minimum 6 months) of culture results and sound antibacterial sensitivity tests results; The AAEA functions at its best to correlate the antibiotic efficacies calculated with various pathogens or infection sites. So the results it produces can be used as a building block to lines of empirical treatment for various hospitals regarding different infection sites. Also it was a helpful tool in monitoring resistance of different pathogens to various antibiotics