Manila Hospital Slashes Infection Rate

The Medical City (TMC), a tertiary-care hospital in the Philippines, reduced the rate of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) at its intensive-care unit (ICU) by nearly half when it implemented a real-time location system (RTLS), according to Excelion Technology, a provider of hand-hygiene compliance solutions. TMC is using Excelion Technology's Real-Time Hospital Measurement System, consisting of Excelion's Accreditrack software and CenTrak's Gen2IR and RFID RTLS technology, in order to ensure that personnel wash their hands before and after visiting patients. CenTrak's RTLS consists of tags combining infrared (IR) and RFID technologies to identify staff members, as well as CenTrak infrared (IR) emitters to determine an individual's location. Excelion installed the system and provided integration services.

TMC, which houses 600 beds and employs a staff of 1,000 physicians, serves 40,000 patients, as well as 400,000 outpatients, annually. When Excelion approached the hospital with the idea of implementing a hand-hygiene solution, the facility's management had already been considering such a solution, says Nestor Cruz, Excelion's president and CEO. The medical center's goal was to change the behavior of employees to ensure that they washed their hands regularly, both before and after they visited patients. The solution would not only track each individual's hand-washing compliance, Cruz explains, but also make that data available to each worker in Excelion software, based on location data culled from the CenTrak system. "Part of our method to sustain the habit of washing is intervention by the unit supervisors, as well as self-monitoring," he states. "Individuals are able to retrieve their own compliance history."

Nestor Cruz

Installed outside and within each patient room are hand-sanitization stations for staff members to use before entering and after exiting that room. However, it wasn't clear if the sanitizers were being used as required by management.

In November 2011, Excelion installed the hand-hygiene solution at TMC's flagship hospital near Manila, above each sanitization station within its general and pediatric ICU and, at a later date, in the acute care stroke unit (ACSU), for a total of 22 rooms. The hospital is now looking into installing the technology at its Institute for Personalized Molecular Medicine (IPMM), which includes 13 additional rooms.