Technology taking hold in environmental services

Environmental services is the heart of the hospital, the critical hub that provides frontline infection control. The Environmental Services (EVS) team has earned its stripes as frontline Healthcare Heroes armed with hospital-grade disinfectants, microfiber clothes and high-tech solutions to keep patients safe and make sure their environment is a healing one.

Keeping track of what’s to be cleaned used to be a pen and paper job. Now it’s handled on iPads used by Baptist Health staff to mark off their tasks once complete and receive additional assignments from their managers. The productivity system allows managers to track all cleaning efforts within their facility in real time and provides measurable data. That data can then be compared to a utilization chart of expected cleaning times, which helps promote efficiency.

Service recovery — such as alerting a housekeeping staff member to clean an accidental spill in a patient room — used to mean physically tracking down someone. Now, it’s a matter of sending an electronic message.

Cleaning technology

COVID-19 upped the stakes on cleaning and disinfecting measures, as the latest in virus- and bacteria-killing technology employed by healthcare facilities across the world to help ensure the safety of patients, visitors and staff.

The system takes into account patient census, something previously figured manually, in creating the daily task list for each employee.

The cloud-based system saves time and helps set quality standards. For employees, the system also cuts out guesswork and builds engagement.

Baptist Heal this one of the few health systems to use this productivity tool system wide, as it is transitioning from using four environmental services vendors to returning to self-operation to better control costs and seek efficiencies through standardized operations.

For Baptist Health hospitals in Kentucky and southern Indiana, that meant an electrostatic sprayer system and a mobile UV light system at each of its nine hospitals. In addition to SARS-CoV-2, the strain of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the high-tech systems target Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), superbug Clostridium difficile (C. diff), as well as cold and flu viruses. The UV system is used after traditional cleaning of a patient room and is activated via an iPad.

The next-step solution includes wall mounted UV lights in a patient room that automatically engage, continuously cleaning both surfaces and the air.

Paralleling methods currently used by homeowners, hospitals are increasingly looking at automated robotic room scrubbers that clean along a pre-determined path. Benefits include consistent cleaning on set schedule, freeing staff to perform higher priority tasks and helping with a tight labor market.

Charlie Stillings began work as Kentucky-based Baptist Health’s system director of Environmental Services in March 2022 after more than a decade of progressive experience at sites from Boston to Denver. Stillings worked in housekeeping to help put himself through college and considered the field as his “back-up plan” to his intended career as guitarist and back-up vocalist for a traveling band, Small Town Stories. He came off the road in 2011.