About Hand Hygiene

The Kontakt.io Hand Hygiene solution replaces manual observations with continuous, automated tracking. It detects when a staff member enters a patient room, whether they sanitized on the way in and on the way out, and turns that into compliance data for infection prevention and quality improvement teams.

It measures every badged staff member on every shift in every monitored room, prompts staff in the moment when a wash is missed, and produces the records an accreditation review asks for.

Why it matters

Hand hygiene is essential for reducing hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), yet traditional compliance relies on direct human observation—a method with three critical flaws:

• Inadequate sampling: WHO guidelines recommend around 200 observed opportunities per unit, a target episodic manual audits rarely achieve. Automated RTLS tracking covers every visit to a monitored room, on every shift, including nights and weekends.
• Observation bias: Staff wash their hands more frequently when actively watched (the Hawthorne effect), and observers record data inconsistently. Automated capture removes observer variability and behavioral distortion.
• Manual reporting burden: Assembling defensible audit logs by hand consumes valuable staff time. Automated tracking records every opportunity and dispense event instantly, delivering audit-ready reports on demand.

Built for support, not policing

The system is designed to cultivate a supportive culture rather than enforce punitive compliance. Individual data empowers staff to track their own performance privately, while managers receive aggregated team trends for targeted coaching and continuous quality improvement.

Key capabilities

The Kontakt.io Hand Hygiene solution replaces periodic manual audits with continuous, enterprise-grade visibility—transforming compliance data into actionable operational insights.

What it measures

The Kontakt.io Hand Hygiene solution evaluates compliance around the **opportunity**—a meaningful patient room visit where hand hygiene is expected.

Core terms

• Opportunity: A visit to a patient room, long enough to be a genuine patient interaction. Each one has a wash-in window before entry and a wash-out window after exit.
• Wash-in / wash-out: The sanitation expected on the way in and on the way out. Both are needed for full compliance.
• Dispense event: A use of a soap or sanitizer dispenser, detected by its Dispenser Beacon.

How opportunities are scored

An opportunity is scored objectively based on completed hand hygiene actions during each visit:

• 100% compliance: Staff member sanitizes on both entry (wash-in) and exit (wash-out).
• 50% compliance: Staff member sanitizes on entry or exit, but misses one.
• 0% compliance: Staff member misses both entry and exit sanitation opportunities.

Visits shorter than the configured Minimum Visit Duration are discarded rather than scored, ensuring passing through a room does not count against anyone.

How it works

A room visit becomes a verifiable compliance record in four automated steps:

1. Precise room-level detection: The system knows which room a staff member is in. A room sensor (Beam Mini or Portal Beam) on the ceiling of each patient room tells any badge in that room where it is. Because it uses an infrared signal, and infrared cannot pass through walls, there is no ambiguity about whether someone was in the room or in the corridor outside it. This is why a room sensor is needed in every room you want to measure.
2. Intelligent visit filtering: Not every room visit counts. A visit becomes a hand hygiene opportunity only if it looks like genuine patient contact. Someone passing through, or stepping in for a few seconds to drop something off, is set aside rather than counted as a failure. You decide how long a visit has to be, and which staff roles are expected to wash in which kinds of rooms.
3. Automated wash matching: When a dispenser is used, it records the dispense and the badge that was closest to it. That wash counts if it happened inside the window around the visit—shortly before going in, or shortly after coming out. Any dispenser counts anywhere in the facility; what matters is the timing, not the distance.
4. Scoring and reporting: Both washes give the opportunity 100%, one gives 50%, and neither gives 0%. That result appears on the Compliance Analytics and All Opportunities pages, in reports, and in the badge wearer's own view in the mobile app.

Note on accuracy: Hand Hygiene takes its time over scoring. An opportunity fills in over several minutes as data pieces arrive, rather than appearing complete the moment someone leaves a room, because getting the answer right matters more than getting it immediately.

The components: a connected framework of IoT devices and apps

Hand Hygiene is one of the Kio Apps you open from the Kontakt.io Launchpad. It works across four interconnected layers:

1. The Kio Cloud platform

The Kio Cloud is a suite of apps for managing Kontakt.io IoT devices, location topology, user access, and shared enterprise components.

• AI Location Engine: Computes accurate, room-level data for Kontakt.io's RTLS, occupancy, and indoor navigation solutions.
• Smart Location: Manages the mapping of physical locations where Kontakt.io solutions and IoT devices are deployed:
  • Location topology: A hierarchical mapping consisting of campuses, buildings, floors along with digital floor plans, and rooms. Used by the AI Location Engine to compute accurate, room-level data.
  • Departments: Groups rooms for use across all Kio Apps.
• Company Settings: Manages shared core features across Kio Apps:
  • Entity Management: Defines Entity Types (dispenser types and staff roles) and Entities (dispensers and staff).
  • Room Management: Defines Room Types and Room Matching, plus a specialized Hand Hygiene layer. Room Types categorize how a space is used clinically (e.g., patient room or procedure room), and Room Matching links each Smart Location room to a Room Type. On top of these, Staff Types Rules by Room Type define what happens when staff of a given Staff Role enter a room of a given Room Type—determining whether a visit officially counts as a hand hygiene opportunity.
  • Webhooks: Sends triggered alerts to third-party systems. A webhook defines the destination URL, payload, headers, and authorized apps. Webhooks are created in Company Settings and then assigned to an Alert Rule in a Kio App.
• Entity Manager: A dedicated companion to Company Settings limited strictly to Entity Management (dispensers and staff).
• Users & Access Control: Manages platform sign-in and permissions using role-based access control (RBAC):
  • User Management: Maintains user profiles, assigns campus access and roles, and controls sign-in (passwords, multi-factor authentication, and enabling, disabling, or deleting users).
  • Groups: Applies roles and campus access to many users at once. Managed Groups are maintained here; SSO Groups sync from your identity provider and are view-only.
  • Integration API: Creates and manages non-human API client accounts that connect third-party systems to Kio Cloud using a client ID and secret with specific API roles.
• Device Management & Device Health: Oversees device settings, firmware updates, inventory insights, and order claiming. Device Health monitors hardware status and sends automated alerts (Portal Light Offline or Battery Level) via email, SMS, or webhook across specific device types or locations.

2. Infrastructure & IoT devices

A deployment combines four kinds of hardware with the soap and sanitizer dispensers your facility already has:

• Smart Badges: Wearable badges worn by staff that tie every room visit and wash event directly to a staff member.
• Room sensors: Battery-powered room sensors (Beam Mini or Portal Beam) installed on ceilings to emit localized infrared signals, delivering room-level certainty.
• Dispenser Beacons: Small devices placed inside or outside existing dispensers to detect activations, track remaining soap levels, and sound local reminders.
• Gateways: Wall-plugged Portal Lights (or compatible Bluetooth Wi-Fi access points) that receive data from nearby badges, room sensors, and Dispenser Beacons and send it to Kio Cloud.

Key infrastructure notes: Existing dispensers stay in place—Dispenser Beacons adapt to internal or external mounting on almost any model. Staff wear only one Smart Badge, which supports Hand Hygiene alongside Staff Safe and other Kio Apps.

In-the-moment reminders: When a badged staff member stays in a room for ~30 seconds without a recorded wash, the nearest Dispenser Beacon delivers a short acoustic nudge to prompt behavior change before care begins. Nothing appears in the web app, and nothing needs acknowledging.

3. Kio mobile apps

• Kio Setup Manager: Used by the on-site installation team to set up gateways, room sensors, and Dispenser Beacons, and to link Dispenser Beacons for the hand hygiene reminder.
• Kio Entity Manager: Used to assign Smart Badges to staff members during onboarding.
• Kio Nurse Assistant: A phone app giving each badge wearer a private view of their compliance, streaks, and rewards.

4. The Hand Hygiene web app

The main web app where administrators configure the system and view operational insights:

• Compliance Analytics, All Opportunities & Team Dashboard: Access compliance by department, role, and shift, department rankings, and team-level performance.
• Audit reporting & Contact tracing: Generate exportable accreditation reports, manage dispenser health, and use role-restricted room contact tracing during infection investigations.

Important platform characteristics

• Built on a secure platform: Built on the HIPAA-compliant and SOC 2 Type II certified Kio platform with end-to-end encryption.
• Room sensors required: A patient room without a Beam Mini or Portal Beam produces no opportunities or compliance data, as room-level certainty is essential.
• Program support: Supplements clinical protocols without replacing clinical judgment—it measures whether hand hygiene occurred, not what your protocol should be.
• Designed for improvement: Data is built for trend analysis and coaching. Staff see their own individual data, while managers view team performance.
• Restricted contact tracing: Only the Contact tracer role has access to it. An Administrator does not get it by default. It searches by room, never by patient name.
• Focus on accuracy over speed: Compliance Analytics results settle over minutes, so the data is audit-grade rather than instant.