DebMed®, creator of the world's first electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring system based on the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Five Moments for Hand Hygiene, announces the issuance of U.S. Patent #8,427,323 by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for the technology integrated within the DebMed® GMS™ (Group Monitoring System).
The DebMed GMS measures the hand hygiene compliance of physicians, nurses, therapists or other healthcare workers who come into contact with patients in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. International patents are pending. The DebMed GMS is the world’s first and only electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring system that meets the WHO’s “Save Lives: Clean Your Hands” recommendation.
"We see the granting of this patent as a significant milestone not just for DebMed, but for the entire healthcare quality and patient safety community,” says Paul Alper, the lead inventor of the DebMed GMS technology and vice president of strategy and business development for DebMed. “DebMed will continue to focus on the creation of innovation solutions that further empower healthcare professionals to improve their hand hygiene behavior, enhancing patient safety and reducing the 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections that currently occur every year in the US.”
The patent, applied for in June 2010 and granted on April 13, 2013, covers several core technologies that provide a reliable system for collecting dispenser usage data (how many times healthcare workers within a specific unit actually washed and/or sanitized their hands). The system also uses an evidence-based algorithm to pre-determine the expected number of times they should have washed and/or sanitized their hands (hand hygiene opportunities), thus enabling the calculation of a compliance rate for that specific unit in real-time by dividing the actual hand hygiene events (or the numerator) by the expected number of opportunities for hand hygiene (the denominator).
“The DebMed GMS provides a significant advancement over traditional hand hygiene compliance monitoring methods such as direct observation and self-reporting that have been proven in study after study to be inaccurate and unreliable,” says Alper. “Now, healthcare facilities have a choice – to continue with antiquated and unreliable methods or become pioneers; real leaders of change, by adopting a truly innovative, reliable and proven effective electronic solution - the DebMed GMS.”