This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
New iPhone application improved hand hygiene compliance
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
DALLAS — A new iPhone application, known as iScrub, positively impacted hand hygiene compliance among health care workers and provided real-time feedback on compliance measures in the hospital setting, according to findings presented here.
“The idea is that a free, mobile application replaces pen and paper and minimizes data entry errors,” Jason Fries, of the department of computer science at the University of Iowa, said during a presentation at the Society for Healthcare and Epidemiology of America 2011 Annual Scientific Meeting. “[iScrub] has a lot of compelling features and configurability and can be customized to each institution.”
The application eliminates the need for transcription of tracking hand hygiene data, provides near-real-time feedback, is highly customizable and is easy to use, Fries said.
For the 47 week pilot project, nurse managers were given two iPod Touch devices and were instructed on how to use the application. Guideline recommendations on when or how many observations to conduct were purposely not provided. Approximately 10,000 observations were included in the analysis.
Nurses that had never used an iPhone before were comfortable doing so with minimal instruction. “They took to it rather strongly and started using it pretty consistently,” Fries said.
Hand-hygiene observation data were pooled via the application and synced observations were fed back to the hospital computer system. A summary of statistics were then displayed on a rotating screen saver for the researchers.
Overall compliance rates among health care workers, both near-real-time and historical, significantly increased (P=.0065), according to the researchers.
“[Health care workers] can incorporate the application into their particular protocol or methodology for hand hygiene observation in their unit,” Fries told Infectious Disease News. “The advantage is, instead of going on paper and copying and typing all data into a spreadsheet, the application automatically generates the spreadsheet and keeps all information in the same format for every observation made. It reduces transcription errors, and can immediately perform analysis on statistics as quickly as possible. Overall, it’s cheaper, faster and allows for more observations.” – by Ashley DeNyse
For more information:
-
Fries J. #69. Presented at: SHEA 2011 Annual Scientific Meeting; April 1-4, 2011; Dallas.
 |
Follow InfectiousDiseaseNews.com on Twitter. |