Infection Preventionists Amy Kirby and Tracey Doss, team members at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, proposed a new tool for reporting hand hygiene monitoring, which is required by Leapfrog. Now available systemwide on the intranet, TouchPoint allows users to see compliance at the facility, department and discipline levels and enables leaders of all departments to track observer compliance.
Amy and Tracey were inspired to propose TouchPoint to help Baptist DeSoto report the required 2,400 hand hygiene observations each month.
“Consistently obtaining the mandated amounts in each of the required departments is challenging, but even more challenging is reporting the observations,” said Amy.
Collaborating with Amy and Tracey, the computer programming team at Corporate created TouchPoint, a database that permits leaders to see graphs in real time as observations are captured and track observer data submission, enabling better compliance with the Leapfrog monitoring standard. The data can be filtered to show compliance in departments, disciplines and shifts.
Amy and Tracey also created and managed quarterly sports-themed contests at Baptist DeSoto to help promote the importance of hand hygiene and keep all departments engaged. These contests led to increased observations performed by ancillary departments.
“We had more than 3,000 observations per month being submitted by January 2023, and the numbers climbed to more than 15,000 by November 2023,” said Tracey. “Now that our most recent contest is ending with a Super Bowl championship, the multidisciplinary hand hygiene committee is currently working on the upcoming spring contest with a March Madness basketball theme. Ultimately, we are marketing hand hygiene as the foundation of our Infection Prevention program at Baptist DeSoto.”
