Last weekend, I watched a college soccer team compete against a professional team. The college team didn’t fare badly, but the professional team was clearly better. The difference in performance showed in the most basic activity in playing soccer – passing. This impacted every other aspect of the game because, in soccer, the pass is the measure of connectivity between two or more people.
Professional teams use technology to improve their passing – they evaluate pass completion by player, position, time, game scenario, etc. A professional soccer team may pass the ball 1000 times in a game, and they use technology to capture, analyze and improve each pass. This level of insight enables the coaches to improve individual and organizational performance.
The basic unit of connectivity in patient care is the clinical visit. Typically, the visit begins and ends with hand hygiene. As depicted in the movie “Moneyball,” a data analytic approach to measuring individual and collective performance, and analyzing that performance against varying conditions, provides unprecedented insights and unique success (i.e. the Oakland A’s historic, 20-game winning streak). Today, a 200-bed hospital may annually capture 2400 hand hygiene observations out of 3 million. This is not enough data to see key patterns with, much less to change behavior.
The use of technologies, like electronic hand hygiene reminder systems, provide hospital administrators with an affordable data centric approach to advance patient safety by improving individual and organizational performance.
If you’d like to explore how our system typically doubles hand hygiene performance rates and reduces HAIs by up to 75-80%, here’s a brief video about how it works. Or here’s a white paper on How the New Joint Commission Hand Hygiene Standards Could Impact Your Hospital.
