Overview#
A paramedic crew returns from a high-risk patient contact and the infection control lead needs to know within the hour which other crew members and vehicles may have been exposed, what decontamination steps have been completed, and whether any staff require precautionary stand-down. Without a structured workflow those questions are answered by phone calls and spreadsheets, and the picture is never complete until it is too late to act.
The Infection Control module gives ambulance services, fire services, and other operational organisations a structured record for exposure events, contact tracing, equipment decontamination, personal protective equipment compliance, and outbreak flagging. Every event is logged against the encounter or incident that generated it, producing an auditable trail that supports occupational health review, service-wide surveillance, and regulatory reporting.
Key Features#
- Exposure Event Logging: Record the date, time, nature, and risk level of a potential exposure against the relevant incident or encounter, with the staff members present and the vehicle or equipment involved.
- Contact Tracing Workflow: Identify personnel and vehicles that were within a defined contact window of a confirmed or suspected infection, producing an at-risk list that can be reviewed and acted on by the infection control lead.
- Decontamination Records: Log decontamination steps for vehicles, equipment, and station areas, capturing the agent used, the operative, and the timestamp so that compliance with decontamination protocols is demonstrable.
- PPE Compliance Tracking: Record personal protective equipment usage per crew member and encounter type, flag non-compliance, and surface patterns across shifts and stations to support targeted training.
- Outbreak Flagging: Mark an active outbreak condition against a station, vehicle type, or service area so that duty managers see the flag in the operational view and apply heightened controls automatically.
- Occupational Health Referral: Escalate individual exposure records directly to the occupational health workflow, with all relevant event detail pre-populated so the reviewing clinician has context without requesting it separately.
- Surveillance and Trend Reporting: Aggregate exposure events, outbreak flags, and decontamination records across the service over configurable time windows, supporting early identification of emerging clusters before they become service-level incidents.
- Full Audit Trail: Every action, from event creation to decontamination sign-off to outbreak closure, is written to a structured audit log with the user, timestamp, and outcome.
Use Cases#
- Post-Contact Exposure Management: A crew reports a suspected exposure to a notifiable pathogen. The infection control lead logs the event, the contact tracing workflow surfaces the other personnel present in the preceding window, and targeted health alerts are dispatched within minutes.
- Vehicle Decontamination Assurance: Following a confirmed infectious patient contact, a decontamination record is created against the vehicle before it returns to service. The vehicle is flagged as unavailable until the decontamination record is completed and verified.
- Outbreak Monitoring Across Stations: During an elevated respiratory illness period, the surveillance view surfaces a cluster of exposure events concentrated in two stations over seven days, prompting a proactive review of PPE compliance and ventilation in those locations.
- Regulatory and Accreditation Reporting: An accreditation review requires evidence of infection control activity over the previous twelve months. The audit trail and aggregated exposure records provide a complete, structured account without manual collation.
- Occupational Health Case Management: An individual crew member reports symptoms following an exposure event. The occupational health referral carries the original event record, the decontamination log, and the contact history, reducing the time to an occupational health decision.
Integration#
The Infection Control module connects to the electronic patient care record to draw the encounter context for exposure events, to the personnel and rostering records to resolve contact windows accurately, and to the vehicle and equipment register to associate decontamination records with specific assets. Outbreak flags are visible in the live incident and operational boards so duty managers see current infection control status without switching application. Aggregated surveillance data can be forwarded to national disease surveillance systems or public health authorities in the formats they require, and the full audit trail is available to the platform's reporting and analytics services for trend analysis and governance review.
Open Standards#
- HL7 FHIR R4: exposure events and observation records can be represented using FHIR Observation, Encounter, and EpisodeOfCare resources, enabling interoperability with electronic health record systems and public health platforms.
- SNOMED CT: clinical and occupational health coding for infection type, pathogen class, and exposure route uses SNOMED CT concept identifiers, supporting consistent terminology across partner organisations.
- ISO 45001 (Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems): the exposure logging, decontamination, and occupational health referral workflows align with the hazard identification and incident recording requirements of ISO 45001.
- EDXL-HAVE (Emergency Data Exchange Language Health Alert): outbreak flags and service-level health alerts can be exchanged using the EDXL Health and Alert information model, supporting mutual aid and cross-service notification.
- WHO International Health Regulations (IHR 2005): the module's outbreak flagging and surveillance aggregation capability supports the case detection and notification obligations that apply to services handling patients with suspected notifiable diseases.
- GDPR and UK GDPR: occupational health records and personal exposure data are handled under the special-category provisions for health data, with access restricted to authorised occupational health and infection control roles.
- ISO 8601: all event timestamps, decontamination records, and audit entries use the standard date and time format.
- W3C PROV-DM: the chain of actions from exposure logging through contact tracing to occupational health outcome is represented as a provenance graph, supporting retrospective review and legal disclosure.
Availability#
- Enterprise Plan: Included
- Professional Plan: Available as an add-on for services requiring structured infection control and contact tracing workflows.
Last Reviewed: 2026-05-26