You may have seen the story in FierceHealthcare on Friday about the sorry state of hand hygiene in America's hospitals. At least two new, tech-focused projects are attempting to address this serious problem.

GE Healthcare last week kicked off a pilot of its Smart Patient Room concept at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., that will focus, in part on assuring that physicians and nurses wash their hands before and after each patient encounter. Cameras and sensors in patient rooms track hand washing, the frequency with which caregivers check on inpatients, adherence with clinical best practices and any signs of unusual activity that could put a patient at unnecessary risk.

"[Caregivers] get into such a routine that it's, 'This is what I do,' and they don't realize that they haven't" washed their hands properly before treating patients, GE Healthcare CTO Mike Harsh said, reports the Reuters news service. "We're able to analyze that in real time and say, 'Hey, remember to do this.'"

On a related note, the year-old Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare recently introduced a web-based tool to help hospitals track and analyze quality and safety programs, starting with hand hygiene. (Health Data Management reports that future uses will include communications at patient hand-offs, wrong-site surgery and surgical-site infections.)

To learn more:
- read this Reuters story about the Smart Patient Rooms effort
- see this GE Healthcare press release
- have a look at this Health Data Management article about the Joint Commission's web application
- visit the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare website

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