Room Types and Room Matching are shared Kio Cloud platform features. Multiple Kio apps use them, and they're managed at the account level. Hand Hygiene adds its own layer on top: Staff Types Rules by Room Type, which automate hand hygiene opportunity detection based on Staff Role and Room Type.
What Room Types are
A Room Type is a category that describes how a space in your facility is used clinically. Common examples include patient rooms, procedure rooms, support rooms, and common areas. Room Types are managed at the Kio Cloud account level and used by every Kio app on the account.
Across the Kio platform, Room Types let apps:
- Classify rooms consistently across departments and buildings.
- Apply location-based logic that depends on room use.
- Interpret room-level activity correctly for each app's needs.
For Hand Hygiene, Room Types should align with the room-use definitions your infection prevention team uses.
What Room Matching is
Room Matching links each physical room created in Smart Location to a Room Type. Smart Location holds the actual map of your facility (the rooms with names and floor plan positions); Room Matching is the connection between those rooms and their Room Type classification.
This mapping lets the system:
- Apply Room Type logic to each physical room.
- Interpret room-level activity consistently across apps.
- Share room context across Kio apps that use the same rooms.
How Hand Hygiene uses Room Types differently
Room Types and Room Matching are shared. Hand Hygiene's use of them is not.
Hand Hygiene adds Staff Types Rules by Room Type, a Hand Hygiene-only feature that defines what happens when staff of a given Staff Role enter a room of a given Room Type:
- Staff presence in a room is evaluated based on location and Staff Role.
- Room Types tell Hand Hygiene where patient care activity can occur.
- Staff Types Rules by Room Type tell Hand Hygiene whether a particular visit qualifies as patient care that should create a hand hygiene opportunity.
For patient care to register as a Hand Hygiene opportunity, the Staff Types Rule for the Staff Role in that Room Type must set a status in the Utilized group (for example, Utilized > With Patient). Hand Hygiene checks the Status Group, Utilized, not the Status Value beneath it; With Patient is a Status Value configured by your account. This is the canonical configuration for patient care visits.
With these rules in place, Hand Hygiene creates opportunities automatically based on staff location, without manual action by staff.
How these settings work together
Across the platform:
- Smart Location defines the physical rooms in your facility.
- Room Matching links each physical room to a Room Type.
- Room Types define how each kind of space is used.
Within Hand Hygiene only:
- Staff Types Rules by Room Type determine whether staff presence in a given Room Type creates a Hand Hygiene opportunity, based on the staff member's Staff Role.
When all four pieces are in place, Hand Hygiene can detect opportunities automatically for every patient room visit.