View of hospital admissions for acute respiratory infections

In order to gain a good insight into how often respiratory infections occur in the Netherlands, it is important to know how many patients with a respiratory infection are admitted to hospital. The best way to do this is by automatically recording data collected routinely in the hospital. This is apparent from the doctoral research of Sierk Marbus, who obtained his PhD at the University of Leiden.

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Acute respiratory infections, such as infections caused by influenza virus, the pneumococcal bacteria and SARS severe acute respiratory syndrome -CoV coronavirus -2, cause a lot of morbidity and death worldwide. Good insight into the occurrence of these infections is important in order to be able to take the right measures if necessary.

Surveillance systems mapped

Marbus researched how to set up a surveillance system in hospitals. Surveillance systems already exist that use data on patients with respiratory infections in general practice (in collaboration with Nivel) and on total mortality in the Netherlands (in collaboration with Statistics Netherlands (CBS)). But those systems lack data on hospital admissions. Marbus has mapped out various options for surveillance. It turns out that an automated system that uses data that is routinely collected in hospitals is the best option. This is currently being further developed. In such a system, the data will be encrypted in such a way that they cannot be traced back to individuals for the RIVM National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

Long-lasting system

For COVID-19 surveillance in hospitals COVID-19, RIVM works together with the NICE (National Intensive Care Evaluation) foundation and LCPS (National Coordination Center for Patient Distribution). This data is specially collected in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic. Hospitals collect data on the number of COVID-19 patients admitted and how their disease progresses. This is very time consuming for the hospitals and not sustainable in the long term.
In order to set up a long-lasting system that can be used both during an epidemic and beyond, the deployment of an automated system is necessary. In this way we are better prepared for new outbreaks of known and new respiratory infectious diseases.

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