MediHandTrace®: A tool for measuring and understanding hand hygiene adherence

Abstract

The proper implementation of hand hygiene at key moments during patient care is the most important means of preventing healthcare-associated infection. Although there are many programmes aimed at enhancing hand hygiene, the compliance of healthcare workers (HCWs) remains incredibly low. One limiting factor is the lack of standardized measures and reports of hand hygiene opportunities. Direct observational audits have reported the weaknesses in this field. We report here a radiofrequency identification-based real-time automated continuous recording system (MediHandTrace®) that permits the tracking of hand hygiene opportunities and the disinfection compliance of HCWs that we evaluated against video recordings as being accurate (99.02%), sensitive (95.65%) and specific (100%). The system can also provide information that is useful to understand HCW non-compliance and will allow the evaluation of future intervention studies. © 2013 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.