Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and University of California, Irvine

• Conduct the Swapout Trial – a cluster-randomized trial to assess the ability of nasal application of iodophor containing ointment to that of mupirocin ointment in ICU patients to prevent serious infection and emergence of antimicrobial resistance.
• Conduct the CLUSTER Trial – Cluster Linkage Using Statistics to Trigger and Evaluate Response – a cluster randomized trial to compare the utility of statistical tools to current practice for limiting the size and duration of outbreaks of hospital acquired infections.
• Create new ways to predict which patients with community-acquired pneumonia and urinary tract infections are infected with antibiotic-resistant organisms, and develop effective methods for communicating this information to clinicians.
• Compare clinical outcomes in non-critically ill patients admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and started empirically on standard-spectrum, versus extended-spectrum, antibiotic therapy.
• Determine the impact of the Medicare pay-for-reporting sepsis management bundle on processes of care, clinical outcomes, and administrative coding.
• Develop an objective, electronically-computable surveillance definition for hospital-acquired pneumonia not related to ventilator use.

Principal Investigator: Richard Platt, MD, MS (Joint-PI) and Susan Huang, MD, MPH (Joint-PI)