AI for IPC: The defining tool of our age (11 April 2025)

Summary

In today’s digital era, data is generated at an unprecedented scale. Healthcare is no exception— data is produced continuously as a result of our interactions with healthcare organisations - community, acute and tertiary alike. The challenge for healthcare institutions and their governance systems is to utilise this rich healthcare data  effectively and efficiently to improve patient outcomes. Towards this objective, AI is emerging as a key enabling tool.

Infection prevention and control (IPC) units have varied work streams - infection surveillance, patient pathway monitoring, novel pathogen intelligence, policy and guidance directives and are best poised to take a leading role in utilising healthcare data to increase the impact of these activities.  

IPC is poised to embrace the transformative potential of AI, ensuring its services evolve in step with technological advances.  Achieving this will require a multi-pronged approach to support the parallel development of both AI capabilities and IPC services.