Healthcare worker contact networks and the prevention of hospital-acquired infections.

We present a comprehensive approach to using electronic medical records (EMR) for constructing contact networks of healthcare workers in a hospital. This approach is applied at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC)--a 3.2 million square foot facility with 700 beds and about 8,000 healthcare workers--by obtaining 19.

Method for automated monitoring of hand hygiene adherence without radio-frequency identification.

Many efforts to automatically measure hand hygiene activity depend on radio-frequency identification equipment or similar technology that can be expensive to install. We have developed a method for automatically tracking the use of hand hygiene dispensers before healthcare workers enter (or after they exit) patient rooms that is easily and quickly deployed without permanent hardware.