Doctor offering helping hand. Medical help, countering viral infection and medicine concept

Contributed by Virtual Manager 

UVA Medical Center, serving Charlottesville and the western Virginia region, is a general hospital with a Level I trauma center with more than 500 patient beds. For well over a decade, Crothall Healthcare has managed its environmental services (EVS) operations. In 2018, Crothall chose the campus as part of its HealthClean program. 

The HealthClean automation software platform unifies operations management duties and metrics in a single digital home platform that allows service providers to see work details in real time, augment their pandemic response, and respond immediately to crises. Crothall teamed up with Virtual Manager to implement this new platform in hospitals across the country. With UVA Medical Center utilizing more than 300 full-time employees (FTEs) in EVS, HealthClean aligned well with the hospital’s processes and strategies. An added benefit of the platform is that it provides a verification of clean, which is critical to infection transmission prevention and keeping patients, hospital staff, administrators, and visitors safe.

HealthClean was rolled out in three floors of the hospital’s campus that held a stable Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) score history and high discharge counts per day. These floors contain five or six units, often hosting up to 30 patients at any given time. Efficiencies driven by HealthClean reduced the required FTEs from 18 to 15 for these three floors and the time required for complete cleaning of a room was reduced by 2,530 percent. While each room and situation is unique, the reduction percentage between discharge and admission held steady across the units. 

The HealthClean software also handled checklist distribution and task recording. The change with checklists alone saved EVS operations costs immediately. Each Housekeeping Associate had one shift task assignment daily that seamlessly transitioned to tablet technology. The stress of managing the flow of paperwork has also been eliminated from EVS managers’ life. This improvement was steady and incremental with consistent focus on process and efficiency trends tied to cleaning times since the pilot began. UVA Medical Center now expects a 25 percent reduction in duration of tasks handled by HealthClean.

The savings of 3.0 FTEs equates to more than $100,000 annually and the budget for the FTE complement dropped by 16 percent. Importantly, the reduction did not affect turnaround time in patient rooms or HCAHPS ratings related to cleanliness and patient satisfaction.