Hospital-acquired infections kill about 90,000 people every year in the United States and account for half of all major in-hospital medical complications. "If you find these outbreaks and act on them, you can cut down on the number of infections," says Stephen E. Brossette, president of Birmingham, AL-based MedMined and pathology resident and researcher at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. "Finding them is the problem." Hospital infection-control staff typically hunt for outbreaks by thumbing through hundreds of pages of results from every test for microbes performed by their hospital labs. In such an ocean of data, only the largest and most conspicuous outbreaks get caught.

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