Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

20 Executive Briefing steady improvement every month since June," she says. The hospital was at about 35 percent compliance at the beginning of the install, and by November, that number had already surpassed 50 percent. "It doesn't sound great, but it's steady improvement from where we started." And, as Mr. Baker says, "If we believe what epidemiology says" about hand hygiene and infections, a drop in HAIs at Brookwood is sure to follow this increase in compliance. Therefore, Brookwood can likely look forward to healthier patients and a stronger bottom line — all because more staff members are vigilant about washing their hands. Applying the system beyond hand hygiene While SwipeSense is often implemented as a way to measure and improve hand hygiene compliance through data, it has further applications, according to Mr. Baker. "It's more than just about hand hygiene and monitoring, it's a risk management tool," he explains. The hospital can look at the SwipeSense dashboard and determine where employees were and for how long, in case a patient raises a compliant or lawsuit. "If someone from the hospital were ever in a litigation case and the question becomes when the last time someone visited a patient was, the hospital can [determine] that because of the SwipeSense technology." About SwipeSense SwipeSense transforms the way healthcare organizations manage infection control. Our products ensure every hand hygiene event performed by staff is recorded, along with date, time and location- specific information, to provide risk and infection prevention professionals with the compliance data needed to effectively administer their organization's quality initiatives and correlate hand hygiene data with infection outbreaks. The SwipeSense System combines point-of-care hand hygiene dispensers, a sensor reporting network for new and existing wall-mounted dispensers, and state-of-the-art informatics so caregiver entry and exit movements at patient rooms and other care areas are automatically captured. This results in a complete audit trail of all hand hygiene activity from across the organization at any time through web-based secured data servers, allowing access to performance data 24/7/365. SwipeSense, Inc. 4619 N. Ravenswood Avenue, Suite 202 Chicago, IL 60640 +1 847 440 6215 7 Interesting Facts and Findings about Hand Hygiene By Shannon Barnet 1. A report from The Leapfrog Group based on data taken from the 2014 Leapfrog Hospital Survey of 1,501 U.S. hospitals revealed that one in four still have not implemented all the safe practices and policies recommended for proper hand hygiene. Some examples of Leapfrog's standards include having hospitalwide hand hygiene education and training, submitting hand hygiene recommendations and results to the hospital board, holding clinical leadership accountable for compliance and implementing performance improvement programs. 2. Researchers found that a lack of standardization in how hand hygiene-related solutions are arranged at hospital emergency department washbasins may have an effect on performance, in a study published in the American Journal of Infection Control. By standardizing the relative location of handwash solutions, such as soap on one side and hand drying agents on the other, hospitals may be able to improve hand hygiene behaviors. 3. Senior health professionals and mentors play an important role in improving hand hygiene compliance, according to a study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. For instance, compliance among medical students and healthcare workers in one study was marginally higher among those whose leaders practiced hand hygiene (71 percent) than among groups whose leaders did not (29 percent). 4. A study in the American Journal of Infection Control revealed that healthcare workers touch their faces multiple times each hour, a habit that could spread germs if hand hygiene compliance is not met. By raising awareness of this habit and its effects, hospitals may be able to improve hand hygiene compliance. 5. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare started a patient safety project on hand hygiene in 2008, putting together teams in eight hospitals. Ultimately, the teams found that a targeted approach to hand hygiene improvement — focusing improvement efforts on specific issues of noncompliance — can be more effective than a "one- size-fits-all" strategy. 6. When implementing a hand hygiene program, researchers suggest emphasizing continuous monitoring and immediate feedback to help increase compliance rates, according to a study in American Journal of Infection Control. In the study, a hospital improved hand hygiene compliance by 41 percent in one unit and 36 percent in another by focusing on these areas. 7. Healthcare workers are less likely to comply with hand hygiene standards at the end of a shift, particularly if it was a long shift, according to research published in The Journal of Applied Psychology. Although the study found that hand hygiene compliance rates dropped by 8.7 percentage points on average from the beginning to the end of a typical, 12-hour work shift, the effect was mitigated by longer breaks between shifts.

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