Our Story

Hy-genie was founded in 2017 by Dr Richard Cooke, a Consultant Medical Microbiologist and Director of Infection Prevention and Control (DIPC).

Mission

Dr Richard Cooke’s mission is to improve the accuracy of hand hygiene monitoring to ultimately reduce healthcare-associated infections. Through a collaboration between Alder Hey Innovation and Deepbridge Capital, Dr Cooke was awarded funding to solve this problem. After extensive consultation with healthcare workers and IPC professionals across the UK, our technical team developed Hy-genie.

 

In 2020 testing phase 1 of Hy-genie in a clinical environment commenced. Hy-genie proved to be highly accurate with a sensitivity of 99% and a positive predictive value of 99%. In this pilot study, hand hygiene activity increased by 14.6% over a six week period. In 2022, the team is working towards testing the full Hy-genie system in an intensive care setting, delivering personal hand hygiene data to individual staff.

Data analysis and reports are sent to IPC teams giving a true picture of HCAI risk. 

The Future

In the future, we’ll be working towards conducting a multi-centre randomised control trial to demonstrate whether Hy-genie can lead to a reduction in healthcare-associated infections. We’re always looking for organisations to participate. If you are interested email info@hygenie.io