Hospitals will take hygiene more seriously by installing a system of "buzzers, beepers, and lights" charged with reminding nurses to wash their hands, and keeping track of those who don't.

Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. are infected with fatal hospital-borne illnesses every year, and poor staff hygiene often helps the bacteria spread. One in 20 hospital patients get an infection during their medical stay, ABC News reported via the AP.

"We've known for over 150 years that good hand hygiene prevents patients from getting infections," Dr. John Jernigan, an epidemiologist for the CDC said. "However, it's been a very chronic and difficult problem to get adherence levels up as high as we'd like them to be."

In the past, hospitals have put up signs reminding employees to wash their hands, and sometimes hired monitors to make sure they sanitized. This wasn't enough; experts believe hospital staff only wash up when they're supposed to about 50 percent of the time.

Last year, St. Mary's Health Center in Mo. installed a new system to make sure staff had clean hands, and they believe it has raised the adherence to 100 percent. A badge attached to each staff member's uniform flashes green when their hands are clean, and red when they are not. It also tracks missed hand-washing opportunities.

The system has made a huge impact in the hospital's hygiene. One hospital unit has 97 percent hand-washing success while the other has 99.

"The holy grail of infection prevention is in our grasp," Dr. Morey Gardner, the hospital's director of infection disease and prevention said.

Akron, the company that produces Purell hand sanitizer, has developed an electronic compliance monitoring system. The system uses wireless technology to keep track of how often the sanitizing dispensers are used. HyGreen Inc.'s Hand Hygiene Reminder System is another option; it is already installed in seven hospitals. The system operates in a similar fashion to the one used at St. Mary's.

A hand-wash sensor sounds an alarm when it detects non-sanitized hands, if a staff member gets three alarms they are written up. The HyGreen system is only built to detect alcohol-based hand sanitizers; since many hospitals are using other sanitization methods this might not be right for every institution.

HyGreen spokeswoman Elena Fraser proposed a new system that will clear an employee to work with a patient only after they have sanitized. If the staff member attempted to touch a patient before they were cleared an alarm would sound. Hospitals across the country are employing some form of system to monitor sanitation more closely, and patients are noticing.

"The first thing I noticed up here was the badges, It is comforting for me to know their hands are clean as soon as the badge beeps and it goes from yellow to green," said Bill Rogers, a 65-year-old recuperating at St. Mary's after undergoing back surgery.

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