With the rapid development of information technology, achieving informationization and paperless operations in hospitals has become an inevitable trend. The essence of “paperless” is not to save money but to make the medical quality management system more standardized, optimize the medical service process, and enhance the satisfaction of medical staff and patients. There is a significant correlation between the environment and hospital infections, and regular environmental hygiene monitoring is an important measure to control hospital infections.
Challenges in Daily Environmental Hygiene Monitoring in Hospitals
1. Difficulty in Planning for Management Personnel
The distribution of consumables requires the responsible personnel to be aware of the sampling plans of various monitoring departments in advance and to prepare specific consumables accordingly, making the statistical work cumbersome and prone to confusion. When sampling personnel receive the corresponding consumables from the department, they need to inquire or search extensively for the quantity of consumables in the corresponding department, leading to inefficiencies in preparation and collection, wasting a lot of precious working time.
2. Difficulty in Execution for Sampling Personnel
Sample collection requires the sampler to possess adequate knowledge of environmental monitoring sampling, including the ability to understand the monitoring plan and to judge the environmental category of the sampling point according to the standards. However, in actual clinical departments, the sampling personnel are subject to continuous changes, resulting in a huge training workload.
3. Difficulty in Information Transmission for Testing Personnel
After sample collection, a series of tasks must be completed by the testing personnel, including sample receipt, transferring samples to plates, incubation, registering colony counts, and identifying strains to obtain the test results. During this series of steps, issues such as sample loss, distinguishing between non-transfer samples and transfer samples, marking sample information, varying incubation temperatures and times for different projects, and pathogen identification may arise. This results in testing personnel spending a lot of time verifying specimen information and consulting corresponding standard operating procedures, leading to inefficiencies in the entire testing process.
Advantages of the Environmental Hygiene Expert System
1. Simple Operation, High Efficiency
① Sampling operations can be completed on a single page with fewer steps, and the system interface and functions can be flexibly configured according to the actual sampling processes of the hospital. It can be precisely tailored to clinical, testing, and infection control accounts, enhancing departmental collaboration and efficiency.
② The testing process is standardized, unnecessary testing items are reduced, paperless operations lower testing costs; meticulous management and budget management are implemented.
③ Timely alerts and real-time feedback. The system can issue alerts for non-compliant monitoring results and automatically assign repeat monitoring tasks to departments. Infection control and microbiology departments will contact the departments to investigate the reasons and re-test until compliance is achieved.
④ Infection control personnel can promptly identify weak links in infection prevention and control through the system, reducing risk factors for hospital infections, enabling early intervention, lowering infection risks, and ensuring medical safety.
2. Automatic Tracking
The system provides a progress viewing module adaptable to all environmental monitoring stages in hospitals. Infection control personnel can check the completion status of tasks for all monitoring projects across various departments without needing to track progress on-site. For projects with unsatisfactory completion, infection control personnel can notify with one click, improving management efficiency.
3. Flexible Statistics
The system can statistically analyze each monitoring department, each monitoring project, the quantity of monitoring, and the compliance status. In case of non-compliance, the system can promptly track and notify designated personnel in the department via SMS to facilitate timely re-testing and avoid omissions.
4. Realizing Closed-Loop Information Management Throughout the Process
Clinical application → requisition of materials → printing barcodes → clinical sampling → submission for inspection → specimen receipt → cultivation → result entry → report review → report feedback → clinical application.
This transforms the previous processes involving paper-based application forms, manual entry of test results, manual calculation of monitoring results, and difficulties in retaining physical copies of test reports, ensuring that personnel responsible for this work in each department master the usage methods. This significantly reduces the human and material resources invested in infection control, shortens the time taken to identify risk points, greatly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of hospital infection monitoring, reduces the occurrence of nosocomial infections, resolves issues encountered during use, and improves system deficiencies. It promotes the continuous advancement of infection prevention and control work towards meticulous management.
The paperless environmental hygiene testing system has been successfully launched and has received unanimous praise from the clinical staff. Based on strengthening personnel classification management and key site management, the management of air, environmental, and surface monitoring can timely grasp the results of hospital environmental and air hygiene monitoring, ensuring indoor air quality, environmental cleanliness, and disinfection quality compliance. Through human, material, and technical defenses, it creates a safe and reassuring treatment environment for medical staff and patients, improves clinical testing efficiency, standardizes testing processes, and promptly controls infection risks, effectively lowering the incidence of hospital infections, preventing outbreaks, and ensuring medical safety. This is worth promoting and learning from for colleagues in the industry.
Below are some operational content displays of the system:
