Major articleAutomated and electronically assisted hand hygiene monitoring systems: A systematic review
Section snippets
Methods
We searched PubMed for all relevant articles published between January 1, 2000, and March 31, 2013, using the terms hand AND hygiene or hand AND disinfection or handwashing. The earliest year of 2000 was chosen because alcohol-based hand rub (ABHR) was not widely in use in prior years, but is now the gold standard. The results were checked against the search results from our prior meta-analysis.7 After this initial search, 3,463 articles were identified for further review. We then evaluated
Results
Forty-two articles were grouped into 1 of 4 categories based on the underlying technology assessed: electronically assisted/enhanced direct observation, video-monitored direct observation, electronic dispenser counters, or automated hand hygiene monitoring systems. Further details of noteworthy studies are included in Table 1.
Implementation of hand hygiene monitoring networks
Costs of direct observation by a trained monitor include labor costs of human monitors and, although applications such as iScrub23 are free of charge, the devices must be purchased66 and require Wi-Fi access or a mobile cellular contract to synchronize data. In the Armellino studies, the video cameras and motion sensors were installed at a cost of approximately $50,000 per unit.29 The cost of salaries for 28 employees of the monitoring center and server or Internet costs was not provided.
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The work reported here was supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration, Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Service through the Comprehensive Access and Delivery Research and Evaluation Center (grant No. REA 09-220). MLS is funded by a VA HSR&D Career Development Award (No. CDA 11-211). ENP was funded through a VA HSR&D grant (No. IIR 09-099). The VA Office of Research and Development had no role in the design and conduct of the study.
Conflicts of interest: None to report.