VA Medical Center In Chicago Installs HyGreen Hand Washing Hygiene System-Sensors Tell on Unwashed Hands

I wrote about this product when it first came out back in 2009 and it’s kind of a no brainer if you will. The patient can see if the doctor or nurse has not washed their hands. The sensors go right on the sinks and talk to the badges.

Real Time Monitoring of When you Washed your Hands – Don’t Touch that Patient Until You Have Washed Your Hands

HyGreen

The company, Xhale has also some other interesting monitoring products, one of which is for compliance, yes one more of those. It can also be used for compliance tracking with clinical trials and they have a section that tracks for use with anesthesia.

From the website:

“Xhale's Self-Monitoring And Reporting Therapeutics (SMART^TM) technology enables the creation of a breath-detectable version of any pharmaceutical drug. SMART^TM drugs release unique markers in the breath within minutes of ingestion, which can then be detected in the breath by using a small hand-held SMART monitor. Xhale's SMART system is the only existing technology which can definitively document patient adherence to a prescribed medication dosing regimen.”

We could be seeing more VA installations it appears as they have had their issues with sanitation. BD

Xhale Innovations’ HyGreen Hand Hygiene System has been installed at the Chicago-based Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center (JBVAMC). This is nation’s first HyGreen Hand Hygiene System installation into a VA system.

The HyGreen Hand Hygiene System has been exclusively developed to prompt healthcare staff to clean their hands before attending to a patient. After cleaning the hand, the staff keeps their hands below the HyGreen hand wash sensor. The sensor transmits a wire-free message to a badge worn by the staff. A wireless monitor, which is placed above the bed of the patient, looks for the ‘all clean’ message and the badge will shudder if the message is not present, thereby prompting the staff to clean hands before touching the patient. All interactions are saved in a database, enabling Infection Control through hand hygiene.

The HyGreen system was developed to mimic instructions from major industry specialists such as the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Joint Commission. An investigation of the effectiveness of the system will be presented at SHEA 2011, scheduled to be held in Dallas in April.