Infection Prevention & Control (IPC) in hospitals is not held back by a lack of effort or expertise. It is held back by information that is difficult to reach in time. At the same time, many Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) are thought to be preventable - clearly, IPC can come to the rescue! For Chang Ho Yoon, Chief Medical Officer at NEX Health Intelligence, Infection Prevention & Control (IPC) teams are already working their hardest to protect patients - but many of them are frustrated, knowing that they could work smarter if only their work environment would let them. That gap between how hard IPC teams work and how effectively they could work is central to what Chang and the wider NEX team are trying to change.
NEX Health Intelligence
The right information at the right time
Healthcare-associated infections are more common than many people realise. What is less widely understood is that many of them can be prevented.
Prevention, however, depends on recognising risk early enough to act. The information needed to do that already exists across the hospital, but it is often fragmented between electronic health records, laboratory systems, patient-movement data and other data silos.
IPC teams spend a considerable amount of time manually bringing those pieces together. By the time a pattern becomes visible, the opportunity to prevent an infection or contain transmission may already be narrowing.
NEX is being built to close that gap: connecting information that is currently scattered across hospital systems and turning it into something IPC teams can use earlier.
Like a weather forecast for when to bring a coat, but for infection
Chang does not describe this as predicting the future with certainty - no probabilistic AI model can ever be 100% certain! The value of a forecast is not that it is always right, but that it buys you time to prepare.
He compares it to predictions that most people use everyday: checking the weather before leaving home. You may not know exactly when it will rain, but a forecast tells you when it might be sensible to bring a coat or even drive a car, for not only your benefit but for others’ too.
Infection risk works in much the same way. An early warning can help teams decide which patients may need closer attention, where screening could be targeted or when a possible outbreak warrants investigation.
The goal is not to replace clinical judgement. It is to give teams more time and better information with which to use it.
If the warning helps prevent the worst outcome from happening, then the forecast has done its job.
Science first, always
Reaching information faster only matters if the guidance built from it is clinically sound.
That is why NEX takes an R&D-first approach. A feature cannot earn its place in a hospital workflow simply because it intuitively appears useful. The team wants to demonstrate quantitatively that it leads to meaningful clinical benefit, and to understand where it does not.
For Chang, that means testing the technology carefully, measuring its effect and building evidence before asking IPC teams to rely on it.
His measure of success is simple:
NEX has done its job when a hospital’s infection outcomes are good enough that its teams want to tell their neighbouring hospitals — and perhaps even right up to their Ministry of Health — what they have achieved.
