HappyOrNot Helps Ochsner Health System Achieve Higher Hand Hygiene Compliance Rates
Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI’s) are an important cause of morbidity and mortality among hospitalized patients worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that two million patients get an HAI while in the hospital each year, and 99,000 of them die as a result of the HAI. The financial cost of HAIs to hospitals is an estimated $45 billion annually (Source)
The transmission of healthcare-associated pathogens most often occurs via the contaminated hands of healthcare workers and can significantly reduce such alarming rates with hand hygiene.
Critical patient safety practice
Hand hygiene is a critical patient safety practice for reducing healthcare-associated infections and hospitals and healthcare organizations in US and worldwide must strive to adhere to hand hygiene practices and interventions universally acknowledged by organizations such as the Joint Commission, World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and improve hand hygiene compliance rates.
The commitment to hand hygiene compliance and success with improvements begins with organizational leadership. Board members, executives, and heads of clinical departments must set a stage for achieving higher compliance rates and encourage all personnel to work together to reach organizational goals.
Ochsner Health Systems’ commitment to service improvement began with a launch of the HappyOrNot Satisfaction Improvement Service two years ago, initially in a retail setting. After seeing high response rates and gaining a quick way to improve service in the store, Ochsner implemented HappyOrNot into their Pediatric, Infectious Diseases, and Transplant departments to monitor patient satisfaction.
Specific to Ochsner’s monitoring of hygiene standards, one key determinant to improving compliance rates is to identify that the guidelines followed by healthcare workers and their perceptions of hand hygiene match the patients’ perception. To this, they introduced a study to measure patient satisfaction with Hand Hygiene Compliance to determine if there is a difference in perception.
HappyOrNot Smiley Terminals positioned by the exit
The study used HappyOrNot Smiley Terminals positioned by the exit of each Pediatric, Infectious Diseases, and Transplant departments prompting patients to indicate their satisfaction with their healthcare provider’s hand hygiene standards.
The Smiley Terminals, featuring four buttons ranging from very satisfied to very unsatisfied, are used to collect patient feedback and empower patients to play an integral role in evaluating healthcare quality at Ochsner, and provide Ochsner with an effective and continuous method to measure hand hygiene compliance rates.
The primary focus of this trial was the Infectious Disease Department, where 44% of patients participated in the anonymous survey. The study revealed the following results, showing % satisfaction with their healthcare providers hand hygiene compliance:
- Infectious Disease Department – 96.9%
- Pediatric Department – 79.1%
- Transplant Department, 89.2%
The Infectious Disease Department proudly reports:
“The HappyOrNot Service proved to be an effective method in engaging a significant proportion of patients’ feedback on the hand hygiene. That the satisfaction rates were very high indicates a high level of confidence in our healthcare providers in all three clinics at Ochsner Health Systems to comply with hand hygiene protocol.”
Ville Levaniemi, HappyOrNot Co-Founder comments:
“The HappyOrNot Smileys help organizations reinforce the message of the commitment to excellent quality of care to patients, and at the same time remind personnel to be courteous and follow hospital guidelines. For management, our reporting tools provide the insight into service performance and enables quick introduction of corrective actions.”
About Xavier Solutions
Xavier Solutions Inc. is an authorized reseller of HappyOrNot. Xavier Solutions is a full service consulting firm for retailers, healthcare, managed services, education and building service contractors. We help our clients operate more efficiently, along with aiding in identifying customer, patient and staff satisfaction level improvement areas.
To learn more, visit www.xavier-solutions.com
About HappyOrNot
HappyOrNot® helps its clients to develop their service experience and sales through continuous monitoring and reporting on customer and employee satisfaction levels. We serve such sectors as retail, traveling and transportation, outsourcing services, healthcare and wellbeing, HoReCa, financial services, automotive, and public and governmental services. Our service is currently being used by over 2000 organizations across 70 countries. HappyOrNot Americas Inc. is based in West Palm Beach, FL.
To learn more, visit www.happy-or-not.com
Contact Info
Sofia Sapojnikova, Sales and Marketing Communications Manager, Americas
Tel. 561-570-0292 | Email sofia.sapojnikova@happy-or-