Cooley Dickinson Hospital Renews Contract for DebMed® Group Monitoring System™

CHARLOTTE, N.C., Dec. 3, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- DebMed® today announced a three-year agreement with Cooley Dickinson Hospital for the use of its Group Monitoring System™ (GMS), the only electronic hand hygiene monitoring system that complies with the World Health Organization's (WHO) Five Moments for Hand Hygiene and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. The Northampton, Mass.-based hospital has been using the system since 2011.  

Proper hand hygiene among healthcare workers has been shown to be the number one way to reduce the spread of infections to patients, known as healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The DebMed GMS electronically monitors whether staff are cleaning their hands as frequently as they should be, providing real-time feedback on compliance rates to help promote behavior change.

"Electronic monitoring of hand hygiene is a key component to achieving our goal of eliminating hospital-acquired infections," said Linda Riley, MEd, RN, CIC, Manager, Infection Prevention, Cooley Dickinson Hospital. "The results we've achieved help us continue to deliver the best quality of care for our patients, especially with our focus on higher clinical standards for when staff need to clean their hands. The DebMed GMS allows us to accurately track our performance against those higher standards."

The DebMed GMS is the only electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring system that tracks staff compliance with hand hygiene guidelines established by the CDC and World Health Organization. Other monitoring systems only track when clinicians clean their hands as they enter and exit patients' rooms, a practice that studies have shown miss up to 50 percent of hand hygiene opportunities, potentially putting patients at risk of infection.

The compliance data generated from the DebMed GMS supports Cooley Dickinson's commitment to continued patient safety improvements, and unlike other hand hygiene compliance systems that require staff to wear badges, was the right fit culturally. "I really believe a large part of the improvement we've seen in compliance comes from the fact that the DebMed GMS encourages team-based collaboration," said Riley.

In addition to the web-based reports on healthcare worker hand hygiene compliance, the staff at Cooley Dickinson Hospital use the supporting educational and reminder tools from the DebMed toolkit, such as the daily checklist hand hygiene champions use to help identify opportunities with their team to increase hand hygiene.

For more information, visit www.debmed.com.

About DebMed®
DebMed is the healthcare program of the Deb Group. The DebMed program offers innovative hand hygiene products, electronic monitoring technology, and improvement tools to support hand hygiene compliance.  The DebMed® GMS™ (Group Monitoring System), winner of the 2013 Frost & Sullivan Hand Hygiene Solutions New Product Innovation Award, is the world's first group monitoring system to report hand hygiene compliance rates based on the World Health Organization's (WHO) "Five Moments for Hand Hygiene" and to date has recorded more than 65 million hand hygiene events.  The system is being utilized in a four year, multi-site research project being conducted by the Columbia University School of Nursing and funded by a $1.2 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). For more information, visit www.debmed.com.

About Deb Group
Possessing international scale and strong local market presence, Deb Group provides innovative skin care programs for all types of workplace and public environments, spanning industrial, commercial, healthcare and food sectors.  Headquartered in the United Kingdom with US operations based in Charlotte, NC, Deb Group is comprised of 21 companies operating in 16 countries.  For more information, visit www.debgroup.com.

About Cooley Dickinson Hospital
Cooley Dickinson Hospital, a Massachusetts General Hospital Affiliate, is an acute care community hospital that offers medical/surgical, orthopedic, obstetric/gynecologic, psychiatric, geriatric, palliative, emergency, ambulatory, diagnostic, and rehabilitation services; along with Cooley Dickinson VNA & Hospice, which provides home health and hospice nursing and rehabilitation visits; and Cooley Dickinson Medical Group, comprised of primary and specialty care physicians, nurse practitioners, nurse-midwives, and other providers.  Cooley Dickinson Health Care serves Hampshire and Southern Franklin County residents in the Five-College region of the Pioneer Valley.

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SOURCE DebMed

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