From the moment you valet your car, throughout your clinic visit or hospital stay, you can be assured that hand hygiene is at the forefront of your care
How we measure Hand Hygiene
We cannot improve what we cannot measure. University of Chicago Medicine is at the forefront of innovation, using methods including embedded observation and electronic monitoring systems to accurately measure Hand Hygiene performance in both our inpatient and outpatient settings. Frequent and real-time Hand Hygiene performance data is provided to healthcare providers at the unit or specialty level. Additionally, performance is reviewed by Infection Control to ensure data quality and integrity as we strive to provide our healthcare workers with the most accurate performance data available.
Measuring Hand Hygiene (HH) requires a substantial dedication of resources and often leads to over-estimation of true HH compliance rates. 
Average compliance among hospitals throughout the U.S., reported through direct observation, is around 47% looking only at hand hygiene opportunities defined as “Entering a patient room” and “Exiting a patient room.” While we strive for an era where all 5 Moments of Hand Hygiene (right) are accurately measured and performed, the current era of direct observation requires focus on increasing hand hygiene performance upon Entering a patient room and Exiting a patient room.
As part of our medical-center wide initiative to continuously improve hand hygiene, we are dedicated to improving how we measure hand hygiene performance here at University of Chicago Medicine. Throughout the medical campus, we are piloting a number of programs to find a measurement process that fits our unique patient care setting including direct observation, embedded observer programs, and electronic monitoring of hand hygiene performance.
What we are doing to continuously improve
Our experts in infection control, social epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, healthcare quality performance improvement, data analytics, operational excellence, healthcare administration, and nursing work together to govern institutional-wide efforts to remove barriers to performing Hand Hygiene. Quality performance improvement efforts are owned by each hospital unit to foster collaboration and innovation as we work together to provide safe and excellent care to our patients. As part of our organizational journey through Lean management, industrial engineering as well as human factors approaches are continuously applied to improving hand hygiene behavior among all of our staff.
Our culture of encouragement
Every employee at the University of Chicago Medicine is expected not only to perform proper Hand Hygiene but to remind others to perform Hand Hygiene as well. We take this very seriously and encourage our patients and visitors to join in this culture of encouragement. Speak up- Remind your healthcare provider to wash their hands.