Mathematical modeling of bacteria spreading in the inter-hospital network

Diseases caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria are a serious problem in modern healthcare systems, increasing both mortality and cost of healthcare. Our aim is to create a network of hospitals which represents real transfer of patients, so that the effectiveness of prevention strategies can be measured.

In the talk I will first present a network model based on the dataset and determine the importance of inter-hospital transfers in the evolution of prevalence of pathogen in hospitals and in the community. Then I will shortly describe one of the provided hospitalization dataset. Next I will stratificate patients according to infection risk assigning them into two groups: highly susceptible to the diseases and those who are more immune. The differences between representatives of these groups will be explored in detail. I will focus on percentage change of high-risk patients within each hospital and propose certain categories of facilities based on their characteristics.

Finally, I will introduce model describing transmission of the bacteria in the network of two hospitals and present some of its features. For a special choice of parameters this model can be used to describe the dynamics of transmission in a single hospital, in which we single out ICU, and in corresponding community.

This work was supported by grant no. 2016/22 /Z/ST1/00690 of National Science Centre, Poland within the transnational research programme JPI-EC-AMR (Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance) entitled "Effectiveness of infection control strategies against intra- and inter-hospital transmission of MultidruG-resistant Enterobacteriaceae – insights from a multi-level mathematical NeTwork model" (EMerGe-Net).