Back in the early 2000s, there was this troublesome microbe or germ called MRSA. It was the first “super-bug,” and it made a lot of people very sick, especially in hospitals. Unfortunately, it was really hard to figure out who was most likely to get MRSA and how many people were actually catching it in the hospital.
The reason it was so tricky is that all the information about MRSA was kept in one place, a special database about all the microbes that the hospital tried to grow from things like blood or pus to see what caused infections. But all the information about patients — like who came to the hospital, how long they stayed, and if they got better or worse —was in a completely different place, like another room in a different building.
To learn more about MRSA, scientists had to do special projects. After getting approval, nurses had to go to the microbe database to find out which patients had MRSA, and then they had to hunt all around the hospital to find those patients. After that, they had to ask these patients if they wanted to be part of a study. The study would use the information that the hospital already had, but the scientists needed to use it for their research and link it to the information about the microbes. The tricky part was that some of the very sick patients might have passed away before the nurse could find them, or they might have been too unwell to say yes to the study. So, the people in the study might not have included the very sickest ones, even though they were the ones most in danger of getting MRSA.
In 2006, we teamed up with the NHS to figure out a way to connect these two important sets of information: one about the microbes making people sick and another about the patients in the hospital. We had to make sure this data was safe and didn’t have any personal details. We wanted to use this information to learn more about who was getting MRSA. We got special permission to do this, just to look at MRSA.
When we finally put together the data about people with MRSA in their blood, we found out that 1 out of every 3 people who had MRSA in their blood was passing away. MRSA was also causing many more of people to get really sick with blood infections.
You can read more about this study on the BMJ.
Because of this, we decided to create IORD so that we could keep finding out important things like this in the future. It helps us study and understand diseases like MRSA better, so we can keep more people safe and healthy.