This past week, a groundbreaking 28-month-long study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) examining the real-world effectiveness of automated UV-C disinfection robot's impact on infection outcomes concluded the data collection phase of the research, with results expected to be published in the second quarter of 2015.
The study by the Duke University Prevention Epicenter Program, "The Benefits of Enhanced Terminal Room (BETR) Disinfection," is the most comprehensive research assessing automated UV-C disinfection completed to date and will present outcomes related to clostridium difficile (C. diff.), methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), multidrug-resistant acinetobacter baumanni and vancomycin-resistant enterococci.
Infection control researchers from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have been collecting data across 10 hospitals and 25,000 disinfection cycles for more than 100,000 patient days to determine how UV-C emitting devices capable of measuring a specific UVC dose may improve patient outcomes and the quality of care. TRU-D SmartUVC was the UV disinfection device of choice for the team of researchers and was the sole device used during the study, academic teaching hospital, tertiary care centers, community hospitals and a VA Medical Center.
Previous reports released from the study point to the effectiveness of TRU-D for patient rooms that are disinfected using the robot, as the researchers have seen more than 90 percent of pathogenic bacteria eradicated using only TRU-D with no manual pre-cleaning. In addition, they have determined that devices without patented intuitive technology, like TRU-D's Sensor360, place hospitals at a significant risk of under- or overestimating the time necessary to properly disinfect patient rooms, resulting inconsistent results, or worse, increased risk of hospital-acquired infection contraction by patients from infected rooms.
"TRU-D's intuitive technology has been validated by more than 10 studies prior to this CDC funded research, so we are confident that it will continue to meet that expectation in this study, as well," says Chuck Dunn, president of TRU-D LLC. "Most of all, we are eager to use the results of this study to continue enhancement of TRU-D so it remains the most innovative and advanced automated UV-C disinfection product available to infection prevention teams."
Since it first entered the market, TRU-D has offered the only automated portable UV-C emitting disinfection system with Sensor360 technology, allowing to precisely calculate room UVC dose to compensate for room size, shape, color and contents for proper thorough disinfection of health care environments. Recently, TRU-D became an even more valuable asset to infection preventionists, as the robot now comes standard with innovative technology that instantaneously collects and reports disinfection data with its secure cloud-based tracking system, iTRU-D. Customized reports are uploaded to a private portal, which allows hospital's infection prevention teams to assess real-time infection prevention results, usage efficiency and risk-aversion data.
TRU-D SmartUVC is the device of choice for nearly all existing independent research on UV disinfection technology and has been utilized in 10 third-party studies. More than 200 TRU-Ds have been deployed to disinfect hospitals across the U.S., Canada and Europe including the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland; the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, S.C.; and Houston Methodist in Houston, Texas.
Source: Lumalier Corp.