VA Wants Tech to Spy on Hand Washing

The Veterans Affairs Department operates a Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy in Charleston, S.C., that processes 110,000 prescriptions per day, five days a week, or about 25 million per year. Now the agency wants to insure that the folks handling all those pills have clean hands after using the bathroom.

Though the VA could take the low tech approach and post the kind of signs found in every restaurant in the country, admonishing employees to wash their hands before returning to work, it seeks industry input on deployment of a high tech "hand washing verification system" at the Charleston prescription processing factory, staffed by 300 employees.

The hand washing system is a subset of a Real Time Location System VA would like to install in Charleston. The VA wants to use the location system to track a variety of assets at the Charleston facility, including computers, and also monitor the temperature of refrigerators used to store pharmaceuticals.

VA said it also wants to use the location system to track the staff in the Charleston facility -- which ties in with the hand washing verification system it wants to use "to validate staff hand washing rates."

In a jargon-laden but chilling description, VA said the 78,000 square foot Charleston prescription factory "deploys hand washing stations at all sinks and also at stationary locations throughout the facility via a dispensing station.

"It is expected that hand washing rates can be monitored as a staff member approaches a hand washing station and deploys a dispensing container. The system would have the capability to monitor the hand washing compliance, i.e., hand hygiene sensing device detects the dispensing of the hand washing product and would communicate via employee badge to record the event. System would monitor the hand sanitizing after rest room use and after scheduled breaks."

WiFi systems have been widely used for real time location systems -- map enough access points and you can locate an object within about ten feet -- but I think the use of these ubiquitous wireless gadgets for a hand washing verification system marks a new low in the use of WiFi.

I wonder what the American Federation of Government Employees thinks of this Big Brother approach to hand washing?