UC Irvine Health System

08/22/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/22/2024 09:43

UCI Health infectious disease expert Dr. Susan Huang nominated for Innovator of the Year award

UCI Health infectious disease expert Dr. Susan Huang nominated for Innovator of the Year award

Life's work has reduced infections, deaths and hospitalizations caused by antibiotic-resistant organisms

August 22, 2024
UCI Health Dr. Susan Huang is one of the nation's leading researchers dedicated to finding strategies to reduce the risk of MDRO infection and spread in the healthcare setting.

IN THE NEWS: UCI Health infectious diseases expert Dr. Susan Huang is one of the Orange County Business Journal's nominees for its 10th annual Innovator of the Year awards.

Her nomination reads, in part:

"For 20 years, Dr. Susan Huang has studied how contagious pathogens are spread and prevented in healthcare. She has led multiple national clinical trials that have shown that antiseptic bathing and nasal ointments can successfully reduce a wide range of infections, hospitalizations and antibiotic-resistant bacteria when provided to patients in hospitals and nursing homes. These trials have transformed the standard of care in U.S. hospitals and around the world."

Huang is the medical director of epidemiology and infection prevention at UCI Health, as well as a chancellor's professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.

Huang is among the nation's leading clinicians and researchers in the field of infection prevention and combatting multi-drug resistant organisms.

Earlier this year, she was the principal investigator of the Shared Healthcare Intervention to Eliminate Life-threatening Dissemination of MDROs in Orange County (SHIELD-OC), a regional collaboration across 35 Southern California healthcare facilities, including 16 hospitals, 16 nursing homes and three long-term acute care hospitals. It demonstrated that a coordinated regional infection prevention strategy reduces hospitalizations, deaths, and healthcare costs. Since the funding for the program ended, multiple hospitals and a growing number of nursing homes have continued or newly-adopted the decolonization intervention on their own.

She was the senior investigator on The Protect Trial, a strategy to reduce hospitalizations in nursing homes, which was named a groundbreaking achievement in U.S. clinical research. It was given a 2023 Top Ten Clinical Research Achievement Award by the Clinical Research Forum.

In 2023, Huang was appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. The council advises the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services on strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance.

During the pandemic, she and her colleagues developed the Orange County Nursing Home Infection Prevention Toolkit to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Her past research has found that decolonization can be an effective tool to prevent infections for at-risk populations in the healthcare system. The REDUCE MRSA Trial found that decolonizing all intensive care unit patients with chlorhexidine and nasal mupirocin decreased all-cause bloodstream infections by nearly half.

The awards ceremony takes place on Sept. 12 at the Irvine Marriott.

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