Proactive Hand Hygiene Monitor
Annually, more than 2 million patients in the United States acquire Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI), such as MRSA, VRE, etc. and 80,000 to 100,000 of those wil be fatal. Economically, U.S. hospitals lose over 6 billion dollars a year due to HAI. Similar statistics exist in the European Union countries, Canada and Australia; even in many wealthy nations like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, the Gulf States, etc.
Research studies from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) state that frequent handwashing thoroughly and cleaning with rinse-free disinfectant is critical in the reduction and prevention of HAI. However, the only compliance monitoring system used in the hospital has been a team of nurses with clipboards and stop watches to record who has cleaned their hands. A study by Medmined (a Cardinal Health company leasing software packages that identify when a patient has recieved HAI) reported that each HAI patient costs a hospital around $5,000 in non-reimbursed expenses, and given that 1 in 10 U.S. hospital patients will get HAI; the average annual loss to each U.S. hospital will exceed 2 million dollars.
The Proactive Hand Hygiene Monitoring System (PHHM) is a patent pending, state-of-the-art hardware/software system using the latest electronics and radio frequency (RF) transceivers. It will monitor the hand hygiene of healthcare staff throughout the entire work shift as well as prompt an individual when hand hygiene is due. The prompt is known only to the healthcare worker and does not interrupt work flow. Daily reports will show hand hygiene compliance (more importantly non-compliance) by person, department and shift. The daily report can also link the record of patients with HAI to his/her care workers’ hand hygiene compliance.
Although there are some handwashing systems and simple hand sterilization products on the market, there are very few, if any, hand hygiene monitoring systems, which monitor both the handwashing and the use of rinse-free disinfectant to cleanse hands 24 hours a day/365 days a year.
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Funding: Seed Stage
Intellectual Property: Patent(s) 12/217,415 | 61/063,496 | 61/063,497 | 61/071,433
