Contact Tracing is the tool within Hand Hygiene for investigating room visits and staff travel paths across your facility. It is built for infection prevention and infection control, and access is restricted to that work. When an infection concern or exposure event requires you to understand who was in a specific room and where they went afterward, Contact Tracing gives you the tools to search, review, document, and export that information.
What Contact Tracing is for
Infections rarely announce themselves at the moment of exposure. Someone is exposed, and days pass before symptoms appear — by which time the staff who cared for that patient have cared for many others. The question an infection preventionist has to answer after the fact is where the infection may have traveled in between, and hand hygiene is the variable that most affects the answer.
Contact Tracing answers that by showing each room visit together with the hand hygiene recorded for it. Seeing that a staff member visited an affected room is useful; seeing that they left it without washing, and where they went next, is what makes a containment decision possible.
Contact Tracing answers questions like:
- Who visited Room 412 between 2 pm and 6 pm on Tuesday?
- What other rooms did each of those staff members visit during that same shift?
- How compliant were they during those visits?
It is designed for retrospective investigation after an event, not for real-time monitoring.
Where it is, and who has access
Contact Tracing is a menu item in Hand Hygiene. Only the Contact tracer role has access to it.
How an investigation works
An investigation moves outward from a single room in three stages:
- Search a room and a time window. Contact Tracing returns every visit to that room that started during the window, with the staff member whose Smart Badge made it.
- Check the compliance for each visit. A visit marked Partial or Zero is a point where an infection could have left the room with that person.
- Follow that person's other visits. Their travel path shows where they went before and after, with the wash-in and wash-out recorded at each stop — which is how a possible path of transmission becomes visible.
Findings are collected in an Investigation Log you can annotate and export.
For the full procedure, see Conduct a Contact Tracing investigation.
Things to know
- It searches by room, not by patient — by design. Contact Tracing works from three things only: staff identity, room identity, and time. No patient identifiers, bed assignments, or diagnoses are held anywhere in Hand Hygiene. That constraint is deliberate rather than a gap to work around, and it is why an investigation starts from the room a patient occupied rather than from the patient.
- It shows patient care visits, not staff movement. The data is the same room visits Hand Hygiene already measures. It does not show time spent in break rooms, restrooms, or anywhere outside the spaces being measured for hand hygiene. This is worth stating plainly when introducing Contact Tracing to nursing leadership, who reasonably ask what else it can see.
- Contact Tracing uses Smart Badge location data already recorded by Hand Hygiene. It does not collect any new data.
- Results reflect the same data available on the Compliance Analytics and All Opportunities pages — Contact Tracing gives you a room-and-person-centric lens on that same data.
- The Investigation Log and its notes are not saved. Export the log before you close or reload the page if you need a permanent record.
- Staff members appear in results only if a visit by their Smart Badge to the selected room started during the search window. A visit that started before the window is not included, even if the person was still in the room during it. If a staff member is missing from results, confirm their badge was worn and active during that shift.