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Does Your Company Need to Invest In a Hand Wash Monitoring System?
November 19, 2009
Many of you don't trust front-line workers not to slack off. Now, with the H1N1 virus making everyone jittery, you have to trust them to be cleanly? That's too much to ask.
Apparently, a technology developer out there was thinking the same thing. A new product that combines hand-washing practices and RFID technology, is being fielded to the restaurant and health-care marketplace. The product may have an interesting application to the grocery industry's growing foodservice divisions.
The HandGiene Corp. manufactures and offers a patented RFID-enabled Hand Wash Monitoring System designed to ensure compliance with established hand-wash protocols in a participating facility. The HandGiene System is intended to be noninvasive and as simple as washing your hands.
Each person who is required to comply with hand-washing protocols is issued an RFID-embedded name badge or tag. This tag allows the company's RFID-enabled hand cleanser dispensing units and ancillary RFID readers to monitor employees as they move about the facility, in and out of the kitchen or storage rooms, and use the bathroom. Every hand wash opportunity is monitored, and successful or unsuccessful hand washes are logged into a database where administrators can access it in real time.
The HandGiene System works with both antimicrobial soaps and hand sanitizers with or without alcohol. When installed in a hospital or restaurant, the HandGiene System is designed to assure increased accountability and compliance with a participating facility's established hand-wash protocols.
"An easy-to-use, noninvasive system that encourages personnel to comply with federal and state regulations and a facility's protocols regarding hand hygiene can and will greatly reduce the incidents of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and food-borne illness across the United States and the world," says HandGiene founder and inventor Vincent Verdiramo.
"We differ from other companies that attempt to offer a hand hygiene compliance monitoring solution in that the HandGiene System works in all areas of a facility, and our HandGiene Hand Cleanser Dispensers can dispense a variety of our proprietary soap and waterless hand sanitizers, said Verdiramo. "Our back-end systems are designed to integrate with existing legacy systems to facilitate rapid deployment in specific areas or throughout a facility. Our Web-based software allows administrators to look at specific employees, crews, stations, departments, shifts or an entire facility, or in the case of larger concerns, an entire system of facilities or locations. Preliminary feedback has been favorable and interest is growing."
According the U.S. Department of Labor, there are approximately 980,000 restaurants in the U.S. and more than 8 million people who work in them. Health experts estimate the yearly cost of all food-borne illness in the United States is $5 billion to $6 billion in direct medical expenses and lost productivity.
An example of this cost is an infection caused by exposure to the bacteria salmonella. It alone accounts for $1 billion yearly in direct and indirect medical costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To the extent that lack of hand-wash protocol compliance impacts these statistics, the HandGiene System is intended to help address this source of contamination and the transmission of targeted pathogens.
Nielsen Business Media
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