Ignaz Semmelweiss was laughed out of his Viennese hospital when he suggested that physicians should wash their hands in between conducting an autopsy and delivering a baby.
150 years later, we know just how right he was, but hand sanitation compliance rates at hospitals still hover in the 30% to 50% range. This makes it easy for hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) such as MRSA and VRE to run rampant, a (literally) dirty, not-so-little, and not-so-secret reality for American patients.
A Healthbox-backed startup is trying to change that. SwipeSense, founded in 2012 by Northwestern University graduates Mert Iseri and Yuri Malina, is a system designed to improve sanitation practices in hospitals using portable hand sanitizers and wirelessly-collected data on their use.
The organization wants to help stem the tide of avoidable HAIs. Each year, about 100,000 Americans die from infections they contract during their time in the hospital – more than the number of Americans killed by guns, motor vehicles, and leukemiacombined. In addition to the direct human toll, HAIs cause patient length of stays to increase by 8.0 days in ICUs and 7.4 to 9.4days in acute care wards, taking up expensive capacity and preventing others from accessing needed hospital beds. They’re also expensive, causing an estimated $4.5 to $5.7 billion in excess costs.
Iseri and Malina were inspired to create SwipeSense by a project they did for Design for America, a student group created to catalyze social change using human-centered design (also founded by Iseri and Malina). It took them to Northwestern Memorial University Hospital in their college town of Evanston, Illinois, where they identified two salient issues with hand sanitation: convenience and compliance.
“It’s obvious it’s not the fault of the nurse or physician…it’s something wrong with the system,” Malina told me in an interview. Even though alcohol foam and soap dispensers are ubiquitous in American hospitals, they often aren’t at the immediate point of care: “medical staff need to sanitize four or five times per patient encounter,” Malina said, making proper sanitation an arduous, time-consuming, and unrealistic task. “Our philosophy at SwipeSense is that the right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do… We want to make something that people love.”
