CenTrak, the market leader in Enterprise Location and Sensing Services and KLAS Category leader for Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), has deployed it’s hand hygiene compliance solution in over fifty of its nearly one thousand RTLS installations. The solution leverages CenTrak’s Internet of Things (IoT) offering to help healthcare organizations significantly improve hand hygiene adherence rates.
One such deployment is in Denver Health Medical Center, a safety net hospital with 555 beds and 158-year history, which decided to bolster its existing hand hygiene improvement program with location-based Compliance Monitoring technology from CenTrak as a means to both affect and measure change in hand hygiene. The technology provides objective measurements of hand hygiene adherence on its units, the ability to measure the adherence on all work shifts, and the ability to quantify the impact of certain interventions on hand hygiene compliance.
After two years, the results of this technology-based initiative are in. Denver Health’s baseline hand hygiene compliance rates jumped from approximately 40 percent to a sustained rate of over 70 percent. Barriers to hand hygiene improvement, such as promoting change and collecting unbiased observations, were virtually eliminated. According to Denver Health, the addition of individualized feedback from automated monitoring systems has been an invaluable tool in increasing awareness among staff members’ hand hygiene habits.
“In general, healthcare workers want to do the right thing,” says Heather Young, MD, Medical Director of Infection Prevention at Denver Health. “By providing healthcare staff with their individual hand hygiene data, they are more aware of their performance and strive to improve adherence.”
CenTrak’s enterprise location technology strengthens an organization’s existing hygiene standards with:
- Location-based hand hygiene events, collected by sensors that integrate directly into hand hygiene dispensers, and communicate wirelessly with lightweight badges worn by staff members
- A full set of compliance reports to support Joint Commission requirements
- Wash in/wash out rules linked to individual caregivers with all wash events
- A map view displaying compliance information to identify where additional interventions are needed
- Audible alert option providing real-time reminders from staff badges to increase compliance when needed
- No disruption to clinical workflow
CenTrak provides organizations with the ability to monitor the hand hygiene compliance behavior of each caregiver without human error or Hawthorne effect.
