Industry group established to improve hand hygiene compliance and reduce risk to patients and healthcare staff
The Electronic Hand-hygiene Compliance Organisation (EHCO) includes eight US-based solution providers
Eight US-based hand-hygiene compliance solution providers have formed an alliance to create awareness of the risks to patients and the cost to the US healthcare system of outdated hand hygiene compliance measurement.
The Electronic Hand-hygiene Compliance Organisation (EHCO) aims to lead and influence changes in hand-hygiene measurement policy and guidelines at accreditation organisations, government agencies, health insurers, and hospitals. EHCO's focus is to improve hand hygiene compliance and, in turn, increase safety and reduce avoidable harm to patients and hospital staff.
Every year in the US, more than 700,000 hospital patients contract an avoidable healthcare-associated infection (HAI). Of those patients, approximately 75,000 will die. While proper hand hygiene is critical to preventing the transmission of many infections, compliance with hand hygiene guidelines is less than 50% globally. Until recently, the only way to measure how well healthcare workers performed hand hygiene was direct observation. But with this, individuals know they are being observed and adjust their behaviour, inflating a hospital's true compliance rate. A hospital may think its hand hygiene compliance rate is 90%; but direct observation only accounts for 1.2% to 3.5% of all hand-hygiene events, leaving more than 96% undocumented and compliance rates highly overstated.
'Patient health and lives are being put at risk by outdated compliance measurement methods which often inflate actual hand hygiene rates by up to 300%,' said Paul Alper, Chairman of EHCO and VP of Patient Safety Strategy at DebMed.
'Patients are subjected to extended lengths of stay and unnecessary suffering as a result of HAIs, many of which could be prevented with proper hand hygiene. That is why the members of EHCO are uniting to drive change in US healthcare policy.'
Patient health and lives are being put at risk by outdated compliance measurement methods
Only within the past few years has evidence-based electronic measurement of hand hygiene become widely available to accurately and continuously measure hand hygiene compliance in real-time and enable meaningful feedback to healthcare workers. While capturing 100% of hand hygiene behaviour electronically gives hospitals accurate data, no policy guidelines or mandates exist. EHCO member companies believe that it is their responsibility to lead the change in the acceptable standard of care to improve public health and patient safety.
The EHCO members include Airista, BioVigil, CenTrak, Clean Hands-Safe Hands, DebMed, Hill-Rom, SwipeSense, and Versus Technology.
'We have come together with a common goal, to lead the change in how hospitals measure this key performance indicator of patient safety and quality,' said Alper.
