White Plains Hospital First in Region to Use Innovative System to Measure and Document Hand Hygiene of Staff

White Plains Hospital is the first hospital in the greater New York City metropolitan area to use the innovative BIOVIGIL hand hygiene system to help prevent Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) by ensuring all employees who come into contact with patients have the cleanest hands possible. Now in use throughout the Hospital, the system both monitors hand cleanliness in real time and can track hand hygiene compliance with 99.9% accuracy on a hospital-wide basis – including the Hospital’s Emergency Department, which sees nearly 57,000 visits a year.

Approximately two million patients acquire HAIs in U.S. hospitals every year — and nearly 100,000 people die of them. A significant percentage of these infections are preventable. Effective hand hygiene, which includes hand washing and using alcohol-based hand sanitizer, is the single most powerful method to prevent transmission of infections.

White Plains Hospital employees wear special BIOVIGIL badges that can sense when they have used alcohol-based sanitizer or washed using soap and water. The badges display colors just like a traffic light. Green means “compliant”, yellow means “hygiene reminder” and red means “non-compliant.” The system is easy to understand and lets White Plains Hospital patients immediately know that their healthcare provider has clean hands.

According to Saungi McCalla, MSN, MPH, RN, CIC, Director of Infection Control at White Plains Hospital, “Our goal is 100% hand hygiene compliance, consistent with White Plains Hospital policies. All White Plains Hospital staff are required to ‘wash in, wash out’ upon entering and exiting patient rooms. Doctors, nurses, nurse techs, food service workers, environmental service workers, transporters, physical therapists, radiologists, phlebotomists, pastoral care, and other staff throughout White Plains Hospital are now using the BIOVIGIL system, which helps us enforce the hand hygiene policy at all times.” During a piloting period, the Hopsital collected over 4 million hand hygiene observations and has gone from 84 users of the system to nearly 1,300. BIOVIGIL technology utilizes a simple room sensor, a plug-in base station and a small badge, similar to a standard identification badge. The system is designed to detect and monitor hand washing events and automatically communicate and securely forward compliance information.