New Hand Wash Monitoring System Provides Accountability

An interesting new product concept, which 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 that ensures compliance by all covered personnel with established hand-wash protocols in a participating facility. The HandGiene System is noninvasive and, quite frankly, 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. Each and 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 assures 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. This is why we created the patented HandGiene System,” commented HandGiene’s founder and inventor, Vincent Verdiramo.

He continued, “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. 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 for 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 United States and over 8 million people who work in them. Health experts estimate that 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 helps to address this source of contamination and the transmission of targeted pathogens in these diverse environments.

More information on the HandGiene System can be found at http://www.HandGieneCorp.com or by calling 800-948-7304.
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