ArticlePloS one2013
Healthcare worker contact networks and the prevention of hospital-acquired infections.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Applications of network analysis to routinely collected health care data: a systematic review.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2018Pooled it
- Article
- Knowledge, Attitude, and the Practice in Nosocomial Infection Control Among Afghan Healthcare Workers in Herat Afghanistan: A Cross-Sectional Study.Health science reports · 2026Article
- Enhancing Agent-Based Models with Real-Time Movement Data to Assess Impacts of Biosecurity Interventions on Disease Exposure in Healthcare Settings.ACM-BCB ... ... : the ... ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine. ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine · 2025Article
- Evolution of social contacts patterns in France over the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: results from the SocialCov survey.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Using contact network dynamics to implement efficient interventions against pathogen spread in hospital settings: A modelling study.PLoS medicine · 2024Article
- Article
- Evaluating the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of healthcare workers regarding high-risk nosocomial infections: A global cross-sectional study.Health science reports · 2023Article
- Healthcare personnel interactive pathogen exposure response system.Infection control and hospital epidemiology · 2023Article
- Investigating healthcare worker mobility and patient contacts within a UK hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.Communications medicine · 2022Article
- Risk-aware temporal cascade reconstruction to detect asymptomatic cases.Knowledge and information systems · 2022Article
- Use of clinical data to augment healthcare worker contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021Article
- Knowledge, Attitude and Practice on Hospital-Acquired Infection Prevention and Associated Factors Among Healthcare Workers at University of Gondar Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, Northwest Ethiopia.Infection and drug resistance · 2021Article
- The Role of Healthcare Worker-Mediated Contact Networks in the Transmission of Vancomycin-ResistantOpen forum infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Contact among healthcare workers in the hospital setting: developing the evidence base for innovative approaches to infection control.BMC infectious diseases · 2018Article
- Hospital Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) incidence as a risk factor for hospital-associated CDI.American journal of infection control · 2016Article
- Diabetes as an increasingly common comorbidity among patient hospitalizations for tuberculosis in the USA.BMJ open diabetes research & care · 2016Article
- Missed Opportunities to Diagnose Tuberculosis Are Common Among Hospitalized Patients and Patients Seen in Emergency Departments.Open forum infectious diseases · 2015Article
- Hospital Transfer Network Structure as a Risk Factor for Clostridium difficile Infection.Infection control and hospital epidemiology · 2015Article
- Harnessing case isolation and ring vaccination to control Ebola.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We present a comprehensive approach to using electronic medical records (EMR) for constructing contact networks of healthcare workers in a hospital. This approach is applied at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC)--a 3.2 million square foot facility with 700 beds and about 8,000 healthcare workers--by obtaining 19.8 million EMR data points, spread over more than 21 months. We use these data to construct 9,000 different healthcare worker contact networks, which serve as proxies for patterns of actual healthcare worker contacts. Unlike earlier approaches, our methods are based on large-scale data and do not make any a priori assumptions about edges (contacts) between healthcare workers, degree distributions of healthcare workers, their assignment to wards, etc. Preliminary validation using data gathered from a 10-day long deployment of a wireless sensor network in the Medical Intensive Care Unit suggests that EMR logins can serve as realistic proxies for hospital-wide healthcare worker movement and contact patterns. Despite spatial and job-related constraints on healthcare worker movement and interactions, analysis reveals a strong structural similarity between the healthcare worker contact networks we generate and social networks that arise in other (e.g., online) settings. Furthermore, our analysis shows that disease can spread much more rapidly within the constructed contact networks as compared to random networks of similar size and density. Using the generated contact networks, we evaluate several alternate vaccination policies and conclude that a simple policy that vaccinates the most mobile healthcare workers first, is robust and quite effective relative to a random vaccination policy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.