September 15, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Researchers at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) have received a $198,570 grant from Aetna U.S. Healthcare to study infection control in long-term care facilities.

Drs. Stephen A. Moser, Richard C. Friedberg, and Stephen E. Brossette of UAB are using a data mining surveillance system (DMSS) to analyze laboratory data at the Veterans Administration Hospitals in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Data mining uses a computer to extract and categorize information from large amounts of raw data. Results from those analyses help alert hospital officials to potential outbreaks of infection or pockets where strains of bacteria might be growing resistant to antibiotics. Commonly used methods of infection control are labor-intensive, time consuming, and not as accurate as surveillance by computer.

"Hospital-acquired infections are among the leading causes of death in the United States," Moser says. "What's more, resistance to antibiotics is increasing faster than we can develop new drugs to take their place. This system is a tool that will augment the efforts of infection control personnel to limit the spread of infection and antibacterial resistance."

DMSS was developed at UAB and a patent is pending. The data mining is conducted by MedMined, Inc., a company that was started by Brossette and is housed within UAB's Office for the Advancement of Developing Industries (OADI).

The Office for the Advancement of Developing Industries is UAB's 13-year-old high tech incubator. OADI is housed in the new 67,000-square-foot OADI Technology Center, the first building in the 100-acre UAB Research Park at Oxmoor Valley, which will eventually house 25 buildings of office and laboratory space for use by high-tech R&D companies. Tenants include advanced biotechnology, biomedical, computer and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs.