DebMed® announces a three-year agreement with Cooley Dickinson Hospital for the use of its Group Monitoring System™ (GMS), the only electronic hand hygiene monitoring system that complies with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Five Moments for Hand Hygiene and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. The Northampton, Mass.-based hospital has been using the system since 2011.
Proper hand hygiene among healthcare workers has been shown to be the number one way to reduce the spread of infections to patients, known as healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The DebMed GMS electronically monitors whether staff are cleaning their hands as frequently as they should be, providing real-time feedback on compliance rates to help promote behavior change.
“Electronic monitoring of hand hygiene is a key component to achieving our goal of eliminating hospital-acquired infections,” says Linda Riley, MEd, RN, CIC, manager of infection prevention at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. “The results we’ve achieved help us continue to deliver the best quality of care for our patients, especially with our focus on higher clinical standards for when staff need to clean their hands. The DebMed GMS allows us to accurately track our performance against those higher standards.”
The DebMed GMS system tracks staff compliance with hand hygiene guidelines established by the CDC and World Health Organization. The compliance data generated from the DebMed GMS supports Cooley Dickinson’s commitment to continued patient safety improvements, and unlike other hand hygiene compliance systems that require staff to wear badges, was the right fit culturally. “I really believe a large part of the improvement we’ve seen in compliance comes from the fact that the DebMed GMS encourages team-based collaboration,” adds Riley.
In addition to the web-based reports on healthcare worker hand hygiene compliance, the staff at Cooley Dickinson Hospital use the supporting educational and reminder tools from the DebMed toolkit, such as the daily checklist hand hygiene champions use to help identify opportunities with their team to increase hand hygiene.
Source: DebMed
