Modeling of Healthcare-Associated Infections
Description
Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) are infections acquired by patients during treatment at healthcare facilities such as hospitals and long-term nursing homes. HAIs impose a tremendous cost on both patients’ lives and resources. In contrast to flu-like diseases, HAIs can be spread across multiple pathways (through infected patients as well as contaminated locations) and hence standard SEIR-type epidemiological models are unfit for the purpose of modeling such diseases. Hence, recent work has considered so-called “2-mode” models in which propagation is modeled using two sets of nodes (people and locations) with distinct behaviors within the contact network. In this project, we formulate a spectral characterization of such models by establishing its epidemic threshold, and demonstrate its utility in clinical applications with experiments on real hospital data