Academic SeminarImproving Hand Hygiene Process Compliance through Process Monitoring in Healthcare
- Date
- 2019-08-28 ~ 2019-08-28
- Place
- Building no. 9, 7th #9701
- Department
- School of Management Engineering
- Major
- Operations Strategy & Management Science
We would like to invite you to participate in Management Engineering(ME) Seminar.
1. When: August 28th (Wednesday), 14:00 ~ 15:30
2. Where: Building no. 9, 7th #9701
3. Speaker: Prof. Tseng, Chung-Li (UNSW Business School)
4. Topic: Improving Hand Hygiene Process Compliance through Process Monitoring in Healthcare
5. Research field: Operations Strategy and Management Science
* Lecture will be delivered in English.
[Abstract]
Inducing process compliance of human operators is an ongoing challenge in operations management with significant implications on the productivity and the quality of the products or services rendered by standardized processes. We study a compliance problem of healthcare workers (HCWs) in hospitals where hand hygiene compliance rates are generally low. In healthcare, low hand hygiene compliance of HCWs is the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections that kill 75,000 patients each year in the US, which can be largely prevented by HCWs following standardized hand hygiene processes. Using a game-theoretical approach, we model HCWs' reactions to peers' (non-)compliance to determine their equilibrium compliance levels. We integrate the model with a disease-transmission model to determine how the compliance affects disease prevalence in a hospital ward. When the process compliance is endogenous, HCWs play a mixed strategy in equilibrium between complying and non-complying. We establish that a macro-level hand hygiene compliance rate of HCWs can result from a combination of four different types of micro-level non-compliance: free-riding, safe-playing, self-regarding, and opportunistic behaviors. Finally, we show that the marginal effect of monitoring on reducing disease prevalence depends on clinical factors, HCWs' interpersonal learning, and other integration factors like goal setting. The results demonstrate that the monitoring intervention may not effectively prevent disease transmission without understanding the micro-level behaviors of non-compliant HCWs. Our results provide an explanation as to why there is a significant variability in the effectiveness of management intervention as observed in practice.