Hand hygiene is now more important than ever to keep everyone in the hospital safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists handwashing as one of the most important ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19.[1] Proper sanitation protects both the patient and the provider. Unfortunately, when providers get busy (like when an outbreak occurs), hand hygiene tends to fall to the wayside.[2] It seems that often times providers choose to wear gloves as an inappropriate alternative to proper hand hygiene.
Simply put, the busier a clinician is, the more difficult it is for them to maintain a high hand hygiene performance rate. This creates a dangerous situation where providers are interacting with lots of different patients and have poor hand hygiene.
Clean Hands – Safe Hands customers are leveraging the predictive analytics capabilities of Real Time Intervention Blueprints™ (below) to help identify risky situations before they lead to a spread of infections. These analytics tools analyze the data in real time and identify concerning patterns of provider behavior.
In the Real Time Intervention Blueprint™ below, each symbol represents a room. The larger the symbol, the more patient visits. The shade of the symbol represents hand hygiene performance. Green indicates high performance and red is low. A room with a large, red symbol is cause for concern and represents a pattern that is at high risk for spreading infection. Clean Hands – Safe Hands has automated algorithms that analyze the hand hygiene rates, number of patient interactions, and the risk of the organism in real-time and sends an alert to the hospital leadership as the concerning pattern develops. The hospital leadership can then go intervene and address the issue before the infection has a chance to spread to other patients.
COVID-19 is highly contagious and can live on outside surfaces for extended periods of time, so having the ability to intervene immediately and prevent the spread is now more important than ever. At the end of the day, these truly are unprecedented times, and everyone is doing the best they can to take a stand against COVID-19. Clean Hands – Safe Hands customers are on the front lines of patient safety, fighting COVID with state-of-the-art technology.
If you would like to learn more about determining exposure risk, real – time date, or the Clean Hands – Safe Hands system, please download our free white paper or contact us for more information.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fprepare%2Fprevention.html
[2] https://cleanhands-safehands.com/the-abcs-of-hand-hygiene-b-is-for-busyness/
