Germaphobes, Rejoice: Disinfecting Door Handles Are Coming to a Hospital Near You

When people go to the hospital, they don't expect to get sicker. But then a busy staff member forgets to use hand sanitizer before taking a temperature. Next thing you know, the patient gets exposed to dangerous bacteria and becomes one of the almost 722,000 Americans who get a hospital-acquired infection every year. Nearly 75,000 of those patients end up dying.

All that could change if disinfecting becomes as easy as opening a door. That's the idea behind an innovative solution called the PullClean, which puts hand sanitizer dispensers at the bottom of hospital door handles.

It's not that hospital staff members want to infect patients with dangerous superbugs like MRSA or C-diff, but with hand sanitizer dispensers stuck off to the side on a hallway wall or installed in the corner of a hospital room, it's easy to forget to use them. A National Institutes of Health study showed that nurses only sanitize 48 percent of the time, and doctors only do so 32 percent of the time.

Even a concerned relative who comes to visit and doesn't use hand sanitizer (Grandma figures she washed her hands at home, so how germy could she be?) can make a patient sick.

With the PullClean, which can be installed on existing door handles, when a person reaches to open a door, a refillable blue dispenser is right there, making disinfecting a potentially subconscious part of one's motion. The handle also comes with a sensor that provides data on how frequently staff members pull it and use the dispenser. Each PullClean runs $200 a pop, but that's a drop in the bucket compared with the $10 billion a year hospital infections cost the health care system.

In clinical trials, the PullClean, which is the result of a collaboration between Altitude Medical and U.K.-based studio Agency of Design, resulted in the rate of hospital sanitation jumping from 22 percent to 77 percent. That's potentially thousands of lives saved, just by changing a door handle.