Quicker, Easier, and Cheaper? The Promise of Automated Hand Hygiene Monitoring

Abstract

There are several reasons why surveillance of hand hygiene performance is a crucial part of successful promotion strategies. These can be conceptualized according to the end-user of the data: infection control professionals; healthcare workers (HCWs); researchers; and external stakeholders, such as governmental and nongovernmental accreditation and benchmarking bodies and the general public. Each of these groups comes to hand hygiene performance data with different expectations and preconceptions and will use it for different purposes. Thus, one of the challenges of collecting such data is to do it in such a way that it satisfies the specifications of all interested parties as much as possible.Boyce provides a thorough and balanced overview of the current state of hand hygiene monitoring. At a time when the field of hand hygiene promotion is maturing rapidly and infection control professionals are facing a vast range of options for monitoring performance in their hospital, this review comes as a timely and welcome summary and answers many common questions in addition to demystifying some newer technologies.