Dive Brief:
- Greenville Health System in South Carolina is using data analytics and electronic monitoring to improve hand hygiene compliance among staffers.
- After using trained observers to discover that hospital staff's hand-washing compliance was roughly 54%, the health system put video cameras in patient rooms to monitor clinicians' hand-washing activity. Compliance was based on World Health Organization's methodology that measures the number of times clinicians should have washed their hands vs. the actual number.
- Adequate hand-washing remains key in combating hospital-acquired infections.
Dive Insight:
Several years ago, prior to this study, monthly reports by unit managers in the Greenville health system indicated 90% to 95% hand-hygiene compliance. But the system considered it to be inaccurate, and began using trained "secret" observers who found compliance was closer to 54%. It says using electronic monitoring is much less labor intensive and provides real-time results that promote change.
The South Carolina health system is teaching its staff a WHO protocol, also recommended by CDC, that requires healthcare workers to wash or clean their hands before touching the patient, before doing a sterile procedure, after touching the patient, or after touching something in the patient’s room that could be contaminated.
According to the former system executive who began the Greenville effort, the issue is that once a worker enters the patient room, there are "significant opportunities for additional hand hygiene." Its hospital in Greenville had an outbreak of Vancomycin-resistant enterococcus, later found on the privacy curtains in some rooms, he said. So if workers entered the room, washed their hands, and pulled shut the privacy curtain, they were re-contaminated and could spread the VRE infection.
The South Carolina health system isn't alone in its efforts. Columbus, Ohio-based OhioHealth began a pilot program earlier this year to improve hand-washing across its 17 hospitals using data and wireless sensors, FierceHealthIT noted. Last summer, a small study found that electronic monitoring of nurses in Canada improved hand hygiene. Fourteen nurses wore badges connected with sensors in patient areas, which buzzed whenever the nurses failed to wash their hands.
What is to gain? Studies have shown that hospital staffers' proper hand-hygiene can reduce deadly methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections by up to 95%. Now that measurement is confirming a widespread problem, the next step seems to be how to reinforce proper hand hygiene and make training stick — perhaps without the use of buzzers.