Usability of Hand Hygiene Observation Apps

Abstract

Effective hand hygiene among clinicians decreases the incidence of healthcare-associated infections and helps slow the rate of antibiotic resistance, but hand hygiene compliance (HHC) rates among clinicians is often low. Facility-wide HHC monitoring is required by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In general, HHC monitoring is important to identify facility care areas, units or departments that have low HHC rates so that targeted interventions can be implemented. Recently several hand hygiene observation apps (HHOA), which enable observers to use mobile devices to record HHC data, have become available. The overall goal of our effort was to evaluate how helpful five different HHOAs were in supporting users in collecting and aggregating HHC data. Overall our participants, which included nine individuals with clinical training, and eight biomedical engineers found that all five HHOAs were fairly hard to use given that they have a relatively simple and straightforward function. There was an interesting interaction, however, with the biomedical engineers rating highest the HHOAs that the clinically-trained users rated lowest.

Hand hygiene monitoring: Comparison between app and paper forms for direct observation

“…Several hand‐held monitoring apps have been developed for direct observation, such as Speedy Audit, iScrub, MEG Audit Tool, Hand Hygiene Mobile Observation, and CleanHands mobile application (Sivek et al., 2019 ; Viswanath et al., 2016 ). These apps allow the observer to collect data regarding all of the five moments for HH, the use of personal protective equipment, and the presence of jewelry or nail polish.…”