Photography by Rayni Shiring, University of Pittsburgh
An infectious diseases detection platform developed by University of Pittsburgh scientists working with UPMC infection preventionists proved over a two-year trial that it stops outbreaks, saves lives and cuts costs.
The study’s results, published April 28, 2025, in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, make the case for adoption in hospitals nationwide and the development of a national early outbreak detection database.
“We saved lives while saving money. This isn’t theoretical—this happened in a real hospital with real patients,” said lead author Alexander Sundermann, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, and of epidemiology, School of Public Health. “And it could easily be scaled. The more hospitals implement this practice, the more everyone benefits, not just by stopping previously undetected outbreaks within the walls of the hospital, but by finding medical device or medication-linked outbreaks sweeping the nation.”
The Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission (EDS-HAT) takes advantage of increasingly affordable genomic sequencing to analyze infectious disease samples from patients. When the sequencing detects that any two or more patients have near-identical strains of an infection, it flags the results for the hospital’s infection prevention team to find the commonality and stop the transmission.
Without genomic sequencing, hospital infection preventionists have no way of knowing if two hospitalized patients coincidentally have the same infection or if one of them was infected by the other. Because of this limitation, patients with the same type of infection who don’t have an obvious link—like staying in the same inpatient unit—may unknowingly spread the infection, leading to an outbreak growing significantly before it is detected. Conversely, infection preventionists may spend time and resources trying to avert a nonexistent outbreak when patients happen to have the same type of infection, but the transmission was from unrelated sources.
The study ran from November 2021 through October 2023 at UPMC Presbyterian hospital. During that time, the analysis showed that EDS-HAT prevented 62 infections and five deaths, compared to if the system had not been running. It netted a savings of nearly $700,000 in infection treatment costs—a 3.2-fold return on investment.
“These results are remarkable,” said coauthor Graham Snyder, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, and medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at UPMC. “This project clearly illustrates how UPMC’s academic partnership with Pitt is providing our patients with outstanding patient care while creating innovative solutions that pave the way for better patient care worldwide.”
If health care facilities across the United States adopt EDS-HAT, a nationwide outbreak system could be developed, similar to PulseNet, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s network for detecting multistate outbreaks of foodborne illness. Sundermann and colleagues previously found that, had such a system existed, the 2023 outbreak of deadly bacteria linked to contaminated eye drops could have been stopped far earlier.
“It is a no-brainer to implement EDS-HAT at every health care facility nationwide,” said senior author Lee Harrison, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, and of epidemiology, School of Public Health. “We hope these findings will contribute to ongoing conversations among U.S. health care leadership, payors and policymakers about the benefits of genomic surveillance as standard practice in health care.”
Additional authors of this research are Praveen Kumar, Marissa P. Griffith, Kady D. Waggle, Vatsala Rangachar Srinivasa, Nathan Raabe, Emma G. Mills, Hunter Coyle, Deena Ereifej, Hanna M. Creager, Ashley Ayres, Daria Van Tyne, Lora Lee Pless and Mark Roberts, all of Pitt, UPMC or both.
This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant R01AI127472.
Media contact: HSNews@pitt.edu
Lee Harrison’s Pitt Research Is Featured in Amazon Prime Documentary
Lee Harrison’s innovative approach to preventing the spread of infections in hospitals already makes him a star in epidemiology circles. Now he’s also a star on Amazon Prime.
He appears in the 2024 documentary “The Pitch: Patient Safety’s Next Generation,” which is now available to stream free on Amazon Prime (with a subscription).
Directed by Mike Eisenberg of Tall Tale Productions and funded by the Pittsburgh-based Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF), “The Pitch” gives viewers an inside look at a young innovator’s journey to develop and present a transformative solution to improve patient safety. The documentary highlight ideas with the potential to redefine how hospitals and medical professionals prevent harm and enhance patient care.
Harrison, professor of medicine and associate chief of epidemiology and microbial genomics, School of Medicine; professor of epidemiology, School of Public Health; and director for the Center for Genomic Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, showcases a project called the Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission (EDS-HAT), developed jointly by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
Using genetic sequencing in a prior study, Harrison’s team identified 10 patients, mostly housed in different wards, sick with the same strain of a hospital-acquired infection. The EDS-HAT system’s machine learning algorithm showed that nearly all of the patients had visited the same interventional radiology lab, which proved to be the source of the infection.
As a result of this and other outbreaks that were detected, EDS-HAT is now run in real time. “Our real-time implementation of EDS-HAT not only prevents serious infections but also generates cost savings,” Harrison said. “As we expand beyond standard bacterial pathogens to include respiratory viruses like RSV, influenza and COVID, as well as nontuberculous mycobacteria, our exploratory work continues to yield exciting results.”
He continued: “Additionally, we are actively seeking opportunities to scale EDS-HAT to more hospitals. We remain confident that genomic surveillance will eventually become a routine part of health care in the United States.”