January 15, 2019

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, we are fortunate to have unparalleled access to some of the best health care researchers in the world. Our quality and safety initiatives often involve top researchers, who not only help us design and evaluate our initiatives but keep us updated with the latest discoveries and inventions that are transforming health care. In this blog post, we highlight some of these latest research findings about hand hygiene.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, performing improper hand hygiene is one of the main drivers for hospital-acquired infections. It is no surprise that Brigham and Women’s Hospital, like many other leading health care institutions in the nation, dedicates significant resources to measure hand hygiene compliance among staff and develop ways to improve it.

There are two major barriers to improving hand hygiene compliance: knowing how to encourage the correct behavior and measuring that the said behavior is working.

Here are a few examples of recent research related to hand hygiene:

• At the Brigham, many of our faculty and staff have taken the Hand Hygiene Pledge and we have already seen improvements in our compliance rates as a result. We continue to use the latest scientific evidence to devise and implement new strategies to further enhance our hand hygiene practice.
• Researchers at the University of Colorado and the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated how introducing a less convenient option for hand sanitizing may boost workers’ use of hand sanitizer and increase sanitary conditions in the workplace.
• Researchers from Stanford University and Intermountain Healthcare explained how they used a domain of artificial intelligence known as computer vision that uses imaging sensors at the doorways of hospital rooms and neural network technology to create an algorithm to monitor hand hygiene compliance.

 

-Hojjat Salmasian, MD, PhD, medical director, Data Science and Analytics