Healthcare-associated infections and multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs) remain a growing challenge for hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and public health agencies nationwide.
Timely information sharing is critical to reducing transmission risks, improving patient safety, and helping care teams respond quickly when patients move between care settings. Without it, not only are lives at risk, but also the stability of our healthcare systems: treating the top MDROs have an estimated annual cost exceeding $4.6 billion nationally.
To strengthen regional coordination and public health response efforts, LANES partnered with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s (LACDPH) Patient Safety Information Exchange (PSIE) on a new real-time notification initiative that went live earlier this year. In greater LA, select MDROs are required to be reported to LACDPH and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). These include Candida auris, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE), carbapenemase-producing organisms (CPO), vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA), and pan-nonsusceptible organisms.
The collaboration enables LANES to send automated, real-time notifications to PSIE whenever a patient with a history of MDROs is admitted to an acute care hospital or skilled nursing facility in the LANES participant network.
How LANES is making a difference
Instead of relying on fragmented faxes or delayed emails, LACDPH can now rely on the automated, digital safety net from LANES. LANES has the most comprehensive repository of patient information in southern California, making it the ideal partner to accurately track patient information.
How it works:
- The Automatic Check-In: When a patient is admitted to a hospital or skilled nursing facility within the LANES network, the system automatically checks their data against a secure, constantly updated master roster of known MDRO cases maintained by public health officials.
- The Instant Match: If the patient has a history of a drug-resistant infection, LANES instantly identifies the match and sends a secure, real-time alert to LACDPH.
- Rapid Response: LACDPH immediately pushes secure alerts out to the facility. This allows local care teams to instantly put infection prevention protocols into place. If a care organization is lacking knowledge in a specific area, DPH infectious disease experts provide instruction on appropriate safety measures.
The process happens in real time, reducing delays that can occur with manual reporting and improving situational awareness across the care continuum.
“Within the first two months of integration, we’ve found that in about one-third of cases, the healthcare providers were not aware of a patient’s MDRO status on admission,” said Kelsey OYong, MPH Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Acute Communicable Disease Control. “The LANES-DPH collaboration has allowed us to close that communication gap and stop transmission to other patients and prevent potential outbreaks.”
Impact at scale
By connecting healthcare organizations and public health agencies through automated clinical workflows and real-time data sharing, organizations can respond more effectively to emerging risks while reducing administrative burden on frontline teams.
This initiative demonstrates the practical value of interoperability and regional data exchange infrastructure in supporting public health priorities. Rather than relying on fragmented communication or retrospective reporting, healthcare providers and public health leaders can work from shared, timely information to better coordinate care and reduce risk.
As healthcare organizations continue to navigate increasingly complex patient populations and infection control challenges, initiatives like this demonstrate how collaborative, interoperable systems can help improve both operational efficiency and patient outcomes across the region.
Check out LANES case studies to learn more about how we advance population health.