At Sunnybrook, we recently rolled out the Buddy Badge system with Hygienic Echo, and the experience has been excellent. As a Canadian company, Hygienic Echo has been incredibly responsive, and the implementation was smooth. The dashboards and customizable data have been especially helpful in supporting our infection prevention and control efforts. We highly recommend them as a partner in advancing hand hygiene initiatives.

Our experience with Buddy Badge has demonstrated that, with the reminders and incentives that Buddy Badge uses to promote, improve and sustain hand hygiene practices, it is possible for most healthcare providers to achieve near 100% performance for prolonged periods of time.

The Buddy Badge system electronically captures data on hand hygiene compliance and also provides prompts and reminders to modify hand hygiene behaviour at the same time! Just like seatbelts sometimes we need the reminder to prompt us to put it on, the Buddy Badge does the exact same thing using vibration and/or a red light which has resulted in amazing improvement in hand hygiene behaviours and compliance!

Hygienic Echo has been an outstanding partner in the Buddy Badge project, bringing creativity, research rigor, and a deep understanding of healthcare environments. Their thoughtful approach has helped the Waterloo Regional Health Network (WRHN) explore new ways to strengthen connection and psychological safety among staff, while also offering an innovative platform to support and monitor hand hygiene compliance—an essential pillar of patient and staff safety.

Families ask a lot why our badges glow green when we walk in and they love that it means we can all see that we are clean.

Buddy Badge helps the staff to be mindful of hand hygiene. The prompt avoids missing critical opportunities to keep our patients safe.

Buddy Badge helps the staff to be mindful of hand hygiene. The prompt avoids missing critical opportunities to keep our patients safe.