Helping to solve healthcare's most critical safety and quality problems.

PATIENTS expect and deserve safe, highquality healthcare that is free from preventable harmful events. In the United States, 247 people die every day as a result of a healthcare-associated infection.1 This is equivalent to a Boeing 767 aircraft crashing daily. Another staggering statistic is that nearly 100 000 people enter a hospital and die from an infection they acquired while receiving treatment of an unrelated condition.2 Studies have found that hand hygiene—the most basic, low-cost, and low-technology infection prevention and control strategy—is ignored by half of healthcare workers.3,4 It is estimated that at least one-third of healthcareassociated infections could be eradicated simply by following current guidelines and recommendations.4 So why is washing our hands an issue that still plagues healthcare? Why is this simple practice so hard to do consistently? Moreover, the media is critical of healthcare’s seeming inability to correct what appear to be “commonsense” avoidable pa-