Huntsville Hospital Selects STANLEY Healthcare's AeroScout Solution For Enterprise-Wide Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring

Agreement comes after extensive pilot demonstrated accurate capture of hand hygiene events and improved compliance rates, supporting the hospital’s hand hygiene compliance culture

STANLEY Healthcare, a market leading provider of visibility solutions and analytics for the healthcare industry, announced recently that Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama is deploying its AeroScout Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring^* solution enterprise-wide, following a successful pilot in one of its nine cardiac units. The hospital plans to deploy the solution not only at its main campus but also to Huntsville Hospital for Women & Children and to their Madison Hospital location.

The successful pilot was conducted over a period of several months in the cardiac unit at Huntsville Hospital. Accurate, comprehensive and near real-time data on hand hygiene compliance aided the nurturing of a hand hygiene compliance culture. During the pilot, the unit accomplished individual compliance rates of greater than 90%, and a 58% relative improvement in overall compliance.

Huntsville Hospital has long had a focus on proper hand hygiene as an essential aspect of infection prevention and patient satisfaction. Recognizing the potential for Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology to automate and improve hand hygiene compliance monitoring, the hospital conducted an extensive review of available solutions before selecting STANLEY Healthcare’s AeroScout solution.

“We chose to partner with STANLEY Healthcare because its AeroScout solution provided us with the means to build on our existing ‘Culture of Compliance’ and support key patient safety initiatives,” said Jamie Fortenberry, RN, MSN – Director Nursing Unit, Cardiology I at Huntsville Hospital. “The ability of the solution to capture virtually every hand hygiene event and present compliance data in visual form gives our nurses, managers and infection preventionists an important tool to see and improve performance."

The AeroScout solution automatically detects when staff members wash their hands as they enter and exit patient rooms, with no extra steps for staff that could interfere with workflow; they simply use the hand sanitizer dispenser as normal. The event is immediately sent to the AeroScout solution over the hospital’s Wi-Fi network, enabling staff members to view compliance in near real-time. Visual dashboards from STANLEY Healthcare’s MobileView® Analytics platform offer highly granular information to identify opportunities for improved performance, raise awareness and foster accountability. Dashboards in use at Huntsville include:

• Facility-wide Hand Hygiene Compliance – Hospital-level compliance rate by time of day and date, along with unit-by-unit comparisons.
• Unit-level Hand Hygiene Compliance – Detailed comparison of overall hand hygiene compliance rates by role, time of day and date for a specific unit.
• Staff-level Hand Hygiene Compliance – Unit-specific hand hygiene compliance broken down by staff demographics.
• Hand Hygiene Compliance Leaderboard – Provides visibility to compliance data by role, by room and by date.

The Leaderboard in particular has reinforced the hand hygiene compliance culture at Huntsville Hospital by empowering staff with feedback so they can see and improve their performance. Huntsville Hospital is also using this information to identify its ‘practice leaders’ with high compliance rates – several staff members are achieving well over 90% compliance – and pairing them with new staff or team members in need of improvement. 


"We’re very pleased that Huntsville Hospital is moving from its successful pilot program to deployment of the AeroScout solution across the enterprise," said Joel Cook, Senior Healthcare Solutions Director, STANLEY Healthcare. "It’s very rewarding to partner with leading healthcare organizations on cutting-edge applications like hand hygiene compliance monitoring, delivering reliable and actionable information that has a measurable impact on patient safety and satisfaction."

Huntsville Hospital also uses the AeroScout solution and MobileView Analytics for Environmental Monitoring to automatically monitor the temperature of over 525 assets system-wide, and Asset Management to track mobile assets, including beds, bladder scanners, breast pumps and other high-value equipment.

About Huntsville Hospital
Huntsville Hospital is a 941-bed hospital that serves as the regional referral center for North Alabama and southern Tennessee. Huntsville Hospital is governed by the Health Care Authority of the City of Huntsville and is the second-largest hospital in Alabama. The Huntsville Hospital Health System includes hospitals in Huntsville, Madison, Athens, Decatur, Moulton, Red Bay, Sheffield, Russellville, Haleyville, and Winfield, AL. Huntsville Hospital Health System is the third-largest publicly owned hospital system in the nation.

About STANLEY Healthcare
STANLEY Healthcare provides over 5,000 acute care hospitals and 12,000 long-term care organizations with enterprise solutions that transform safety, security and operational efficiency. The STANLEY Healthcare solution set enables customers to achieve organizational excellence and superior care in five critical areas: Patient Safety, Security & Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Clinical Operations & Workflow and Supply Chain & Asset Management. These solutions are complemented by consulting, training, implementation and integration services. STANLEY Healthcare is proud to be part of Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. For more information, visit stanleyhealthcare.com.

^* Hand Hygiene Compliance Monitoring is a limited-release version. The final, commercial version may differ from the description here.