Hand washing: a new tool

I was reading the "Best of What's New 2009" article in Popular Science, and one innovation seemed to be of general interest to everyone concerned about the hand-washing problem: the Xhale HyGreen.

The Xhale HyGreen is essentially a tracking system of healthcare workers' hand-washing habits. Every time a worker washes his hands, a sensor at the hand-washing station detects the alcohol from the alcohol-based sanitizer. The detector then sends a message to a wireless badge on the worker's shirt pocket. If a worker enters a patient's room without having washed his hands, the badge vibrates and displays a red light to remind them to wash their hands. Additionally, all the data from both the hand-washing events and the patient-interaction events are collected and stored, indexed by the worker's badge number and the patient's room.

This system adds personal accountability into the mix. We talked a lot about the reasons why healthcare workers fail to wash their hands, and inconvenience of the hand washing stations and lack of salient consequences are the main reasons I remember. This system adds salient consequences. A hospital's infectious disease staff can track each employee's compliance with hand-washing policies. Additionally, patients will know if a worker has failed to wash his hands and can advocate for themselves. It's sort of a nanny system, but maybe that's what healthcare workers need. The system doesn't seem to add any barriers to hand-washing, just consequences to its absence.