Over the last few months, we have attended several meetings and conferences focused on health care facilities and infection control. We talked with many different care providers and listened to their challenges, concerns, and observations.
What we found was an increasing conscientiousness around the hand hygiene process and its connection to higher quality, better outcomes, and positive sentiment. Here’s a recap of the top three issues we heard.
1. How to be the hospital of choice for patients and physicians.
When patients can choose where to go for health care, and physicians can choose where to refer patients, health care facilities want to be the top choice for care. Facilities also want to maintain loyalty and prevent patients from seeking alternate places for care.
With competition becoming more intense, hospital and facility leaders are making investments into systems and processes that improve safety, quality and outcomes. Good quality scores, such as those from the Leapfrog Group, are key. And with hand hygiene accounting a good portion of the total grade, health care providers are thinking more seriously about automated systems to boost compliance.
2. How to show patients the facility takes quality seriously.
Most patients and their families are not intimately familiar with the clinical details of infection control. But they do understand the importance of cleanliness, including hand hygiene. Patients notice when there’s a spill on the floor, or a stain on the furniture.
Several of our clients have told us that patients and visitors also notice the BioVigil badges worn by their care providers. They understand when the badge light is green, it means the provider has properly cleaned their hands. Our clients tell us their patients feel reassured, and safe.
3. How to relieve the burden of hand hygiene observation.
Using direct observation to record compliance with hand hygiene practice is labor intensive and takes time away from important patient care activities. Direct observation also relies on manual data collection and system input, which tends to be both unreliable and time consuming.
Health care providers are seeking ways to ease this process, while ensuring their staff is complying with appropriate hand hygiene practices. Providers also are concerned about the cost of lost time due to demands of manual observation, and the cost of HAI and HAC penalties when infections occur.
There is now an increased level of awareness of electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems as a solution. Automated hand hygiene monitoring systems have been shown to drastically increase recorded hand hygiene opportunities from hundreds per week to thousands per day. In addition, automated systems provide faster and broader data collection, which provides insights that enable users to correct problems and work with individuals who may need more coaching.
One final note from our recent travels revolves around integration. With so many technologies for health care staff in use today, health care providers can easily become overburdened with badges and wearable devices.
As a long-term strategy, BioVigil is looking into integration with other wearable devices, to maximize value while minimizing the number of devices a care provider needs to wear.
Do you have a concern that’s not listed here? Let us know by contacting us!