Study: EMR data can enhance hand hygiene compliance, infection prevention

Editor's Note

Using electronic medical record (EMR) data to track time-stamped information on patient movements and interaction with healthcare workers (HCWs) can help predict and block potential avenues for pathogen transmission, researchers claim. Healio reported the news January 24.

Published in the journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the research involved building an agent-based simulation of ICU environments using time-stamped EMR data to track patient movements and healthcare worker (HCW) interactions. This approach provided a clearer understanding of how infections spread through direct contact and environmental contamination.

As reported in Healio, the study identified three primary drivers of infection variability: admission prevalence, HCW hand hygiene compliance, and room disinfection efficacy (admission prevalence could not be modified in the simulation, so the research focused on interventions targeting hand hygiene and environmental cleaning). Findings showed that increasing HCW hand hygiene compliance from 70% to 95% could reduce infection rates by 36%. Similarly, improving room disinfection efficacy from 50% to 95% led to a 31% reduction in infections, while lowering post-handwashing residual contamination from 50% to 1% resulted in a 26% decrease.  

According to the article, researchers tout the findings as evidence that simulations offer a cost-effective, insightful alternative to costly clinical trials of infection prevention strategies with mixed results. Future research should focus on areas of greatest uncertainty, particularly the relative roles of environmental contamination and HCW-mediated transmission.