Design and Evaluation of Seamless Hand Hygiene Monitoring System

In-hospital infections pose a great risk for patients’ health; extend patients’ stay at hospitals, and increase per patient costs significantly. It is well recognized that better compliance to hand hygiene can significantly reduce such infections. Current monitoring approaches are difficult to deploy, and bring about significant level of overhead to clinicians. Therefore, many hospitals today still rely on direct observations, surveys, and dispenser usage measurements to assess sanitization compliance. We have developed a seamless monitoring technique that utilizes smart phones instead of additional dedicated devices. The key novelty of this approach is its compatibility with any existing hospital dispenser, and that it does not involve any overhead to participating clinicians. In addition, this approach enables the monitoring of missed-opportunities, where a clinician fails to utilize a sanitizer at key steps along a care delivery process. This paper presents the approach, and presents an experimental evaluation of the technology in the lab and at a large urban hospital.